The English Department has over 60 faculty teaching English 1A & 1B courses to our SJSU students.  Many of these faculty already employ interesting and viable digital tools to their composition assignments.  Here, Ed Sams briefly tells us about using Twitter, an online, freely available, micro-blogging platform:

I would like to share with you my use of Twitter in English 1B this semester, Spring 2010.  Since English 1B focuses on research, I used Twitter in order to tweet to students possible research topics (like Hobbit bones found in Indonesia or deep oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico).  Later when I approved student topics, I would tweet articles that I read which were related to students' research.  From anecdotal information I learned that some students followed my tweets to help them select topics.  Also, I know from first-hand experience the research available for many of their topics because the up-to-date secondary sources were still recorded on Twitter.  All in all, I cannot say that Twitter worked extraordinarily well, but well enough that I plan to use it next time I teach English 1B.