Twitter, the popular "micro-blogging" communications platform, is used in Saudi Arabia mostly by the young to exchange news and follow peers' activities. Though a number of academic uses have evolved in other countries, none had been attempted here. So I decided to test the effectiveness of Twitter as a tool for keeping my students connected to the blog for my "Introduction to Operating Systems" course. Though it came with a number of challenges and setbacks, the service proved very valuable to my students.

Twitter is a free service that allows users to exchange short messages (known as tweets) of up to 140 characters quickly and easily. Tweets can be read via email, instant messages (IM), text messages on a mobile phone, or on the Web. In the second semester of the academic year 2007-08, I asked the 190 students enrolled in my course to sign up for Twitter so they could receive classroom announcements and news posted on the course blog. Sixty students signed up for the service.

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