Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education and has most recently worked as consultant for Tony Bates Associates LTD in the planning and management of e-learning and distance education. He uses Twitter to share his ideas about e-learning, distance education, and current research in learning and technology. His experience is broad, he has worked for private businesses, government, and universities; however, he currently works as a Research Associate for Contact North, an organization supporting rural and remote Indigenous and Francophone communities access education from their communities. His educational interests include higher education, providing resources for students, faculty, and administrators interested in online learning, and teaching with technology. As a professional, Bates provides leadership and consultation that support the planning, management, and integration of e-learning technology. It has been argued that, John Dewey viewed a community of learning essential to the success of developing knowledge and learning (Cummings, 2000). Like Dewey, Bates advocates for the effective development of online learning environments that are collaborative and build a community of learning.
Bates uses his Twitter account to disseminate information from his website tonybates.ca to his followers. Based on my research of Bates’ Twitter account, he has never retweeted a single tweet that I came across throughout this research process (I scrolled through about 2.5 years of Tweets). The way Bates’ disseminates ideas on Twitter, is closely aligned to how an educator might develop a knowledge-centered learning environment. Knowledge-centered learning environments focus on helping learners with deep understanding developing critical thinking skills. Knowledge-centered learning is constructed and sequenced so that subject matter builds on pre-existing knowledge (Egan-Simon, 2019). John McPeck (2000) and other critical thinking theorists argue that teaching general thinking skills and techniques is useless outside of a particular knowledge domain in which they can be grounded. Dewey argued that curriculum should be relevant to learners’ lives (Dewey & Archambault, 1974). Bates’ Twitter feed is very focused and for someone who does not have some investment or interest in the field of education, the information Bates is tweeting would be irrelevant and his tweets would be easily passed by. Bates is also creating a well-organized, extensive resource covering topics on online learning, distance education, research, open educational resources, strategic planning, cost-benefit analysis for educational technology, virtual reality, gaming, learning management systems, and policy development and management targeted towards higher education, he also tweets about primary and and secondary education. He is disseminating facts, ideas, and concepts that are relevant to education, in a timely manner.
Bates’ tweets about topics related to online learning and distance education. His feed is populated with posts that review books and articles related to e-learning. He advocates for creating effective online learning environments. As well as, shares relevant professional development, education and other resources for teachers, administrators, and students who are interested in e-learning and distance education. Bates’ attempts to balance his tweets, for example, he is attuned to the digital divide that online learning environments can create and in the past two years has tweeted about this on a number of occasions.
Bates bids farewell to Trump.
Bates currently has 6,420 followers and is following 28 others himself. He follows: Steven Downes, Canadian Digital Learning Research Association, Audrey Watters and Hack Education, Office of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education, Dr. Alec Couros, EDUCAUSE, George Siemens, and Lisa Neilsen from InnovatorEducator.com. Bates’ reach is extensive, he has educators, administrators, and policy makers following him from around the globe. Some of his followers include: George Veletsianos, Clint Lalonde, ETHE Journal, PREVNet, Associació Catalana d’Universitats Públiques, Ronald Wagner, LMSPulse, Tessa Davis, The Department of Technology Enhanced at Learning Munster Technological University, Penn State University, Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and Hong Kong University, and OER Lebanon.
Educational theory is comprised of a number of theories, rather than a single explanation, of how we learn and how we should teach. Educational theory covers the many theories that explain the application, interpretation, and purpose of learning and education. Twitter is reshaping educational theory by providing educators and theorists in the field of education mobile technology to create social discussions on virtually any topic related to the research, application, interpretation, and purpose of learning and education. Twitter is a powerful platform to gather, provide, and access information and data and provides users a way to collaborate and communicate effectively.
Twitter is changing the way students, educators, administrators, and policy makers get information. As Bolter and Grusin (1999) indicate, media is ever changing and remediation of media stems from changing an original work into a new medium. It can take months and years to have academic research published in journals, weeks and days to review a publication, hours to publish a news story. Twitter’s 140 character maximum creates an efficient and effective method to communicate and provides immediate access to anyone who signs up for an account. The development of technology itself stems from remediation; cell phones, tablets, touch screens, hypertext, video recording, podcasts, etc. have all been developed to accommodate people’s consumption and dissemination of media. Twitter holds and delivers the content, but the content on Twitter is so vast that a user will never be able to read or interact with all of the content on Twitter. In his discussion of the electric light, McLuhan (1964) says the content of the medium is the activities that the electric light allowed. The electric light has no decision on what the content is, the content may be anything. There will always be new content being remediated from old content, because the desire for more interaction motivates remediation.
References
Bates, T. [@drtonybates]. (2021, October 22). Twitter. https://twitter.com/drtonybates?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Cummings, C. K. (2000). John Dewey and the rebuilding of urban community: Engaging undergraduates as neighborhood organizers. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7, 97. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0007.111
Dewey, J., & Archambault, R. D. (1974). John dewey on education: Selected writings. University of Chicago Press.
Egan-Simon, D. (2019). Knowledge-Centered Curriculum. Chartered College of Teaching.
Jay David Bolter, & Richard Grusin. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Signet Books. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
McPeck, J. (1990). Teaching critical thinking: Dialogue and Dialetic (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315526492
Tony Bates & Contact North. (2018, September 19). Tony Bates | Online Learning and Distance Education Resources. Tony Bates. Retrieved October 19, 2021, from https://www.tonybates.ca/