The world seems to have gone Twitter mad, with people sending ‘tweets’ of up to 140 characters detailing the minutiae of their day. I’m afraid that I can’t get excited by the idea of following which celebrity has just stopped for a cup of coffee or gone to have their hair done, but Twitter is already breaking through into the world of academia. Some universities are using this system to help students keep in touch with their department, see for example the Department of Chemistry at the University of York: www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/.
I wondered if the idea of packaging your life into 140-character chunks could be used to help with exam preparation. Breaking a subject down into bite-sized pieces is a long-accepted revision method, summarising topics and writing down the key facts. Many years ago, when I was revising for my A-levels, I felt very pleased with myself when I managed to condense all of my physics notes down from two lever-arch files into a single 50-page notebook only 7 × 9 cm in size. In this modern, digital age why not do the same thing electronically? The challenge of summarising your chemistry topics into 140-character tweets would be a good way of focusing on the essential content; you could then share these with your friends and set up a whole chemistry Twitter network.
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