In case you are wondering about the linguistic symbology of Twitter, I thought I'd give a simple guide to basic sentence construction, which might lead to better literacy.

The basic's ...

I - “tuna, nomnom”

You - “@random tuna?l”

We - “@him @her – tuna!”

They – “you're kidding @him @her – tuna?”

Us - “#tunafest @me @him @her – yum”

How to reference Twitter-citations properly. An exemplar.

According to @teach42 (14:32, 2.2.2010), the world was eating tuna. However several commentators disagree (@4goggas, 14:41, 2.2.2010; @ictmadesimple 14.42, 2.2.2010; @kerryjcom;14.50:2.2.2010), suggest that #cupcakes meme (13:32, 2.2.2010), trended strongly at the time. In several RTs and @mentions it was claimed – @lemonslice, the creator of #cupcakes increased their followers ten fold between (13.32, 2.2.2010 and 15:30, 2.2.2010) in a quantitative study using Twitterfall analysis. This was subsequently studied in #yam and #twitterfeed, recommending further longitudinal study using the #cupcakechat method pioneered by #everybody.

The lunacy of functional literacy in digital space

Verbs, substantives, conjunctions etc., are different online and don't assume knowledge is being written in a sequence. I am not saying academic literacy isn't important – but it's not important if you're asking students to write in order to learn as a formative exercise. Get over it, its un-natural.

Furthermore, imagine anyone refusing to read a website, a txt or anything online until Firefox, Google, Microsoft, Explorer produced an academic literacy version. Imagine if Twitter was a forum and you had to enroll with your real-name and everything you wrote was visible to everyone. (It would be called a forum).

This is obviously an officious fiction – however a speaker at the DeHub 2011 conference confronted the assembly, saying “Anyone who can't use Google, has no business in Higher Education”. My heart sank – really? Is this as far as we've come?. He was deadly serious.

There's a lot of mania in education, for example people using Wiki's to engage student un-natural behaviour; contrived blogs insisting on academic referencing – rather than a hyperlink. It's just brain-missing and about as natural as putting lipstick on a pig.

And yet, we debate whether ideas such as Open Education, Open Learning will provide 'quality'. I would suggest that we firstly remove some of the lunacy. Please just go with the flow, let the rivers run – the internet does what it say's on the box.