Twitter breaks down barriers in the classroom:

“As an experiment, Parry made Twitter a class assignment and got his students to engage in microblogging as homework. He observed how Twitter became the link that connected conversations inside and out of class. ‘Because the students had the shared classroom experience, when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time, it often got twittered,’ he notes. ‘This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the ‘real world.” He also discovered that it changed classroom dynamics in a positive way, encouraging more respectful and productive interaction between students by turning the class into a community.”

(Via Ars Technica.)