Great start into #electionclass: Social network & trending topic on Twitter

We started to teach our #electionclass today: Anthony for the iSchool undergraduates and I for the Maxwell School’s graduate students. My student started slow – setting up a Twitter account for the first time, while many of Anthony’s students had prior experience.

The students engaged with ongoing political topics related to the campaign, with each other and with some of our guest speakers. Zach Green, aka @140elect, was super fast and set up a whole page with our tweets about #electionclass: http://140elect.com/electionclass/ Zach will share some of his insights about his ongoing analysis about the campaign with our class – hopefully right after the first presidential debate.

Marc Smith from the Social Media Research Foundation has created a NodeXL Twitter network from the interactions among the students and with us:

The students’ interactions on Twitter made our hashtag #electionclass a trending topic in the US.