The impact of one French tweet

Visibilit&e#180;. The word itself appears on the 1,873th page of the French dictionary Le Grand Robert (12th edition). It can mean "impact" or revealing things clearly. It is also what Dr. Catherine Caws, chair of the UVic French department, achieved with the class of FRAN400: Advanced Studies in French Linguistics: on Sept. 10, the Le Robert editors-without paper or ink and entirely online-reached out impromptu to retweet about the course and to find out more. Now that's visibility.

"Here we are on the West Coast of Canada," says Caws, "teaching French in North America, and one of my students gets retweeted by Le Robert in Paris wanting to know about the course. Only Twitter could have this impact."

The Fall 2013 upper-level course on lexicology and semantics, offered to third- and fourth-year UVic students in the French program, was intended to expose students to other scholars, ideas and sharing of knowledge and particularly by using Twitter (#lexico400). The class met once a week for two hours; students then engaged in discussion on the blog (lexico400.wordpress.com) to address various questions based on additional materials, including scholarly articles but also other coverage as well as video.

The first discussion was on a one-hour video by famous French lexicographer, media personality and Le Robert editor-in-chief Alain Rey. The topic caused a flurry of chatter and evaluation and "had a real impact on the students right away," says Caws. "They got to discover and explore what it means to be a lexicographer."

With 40 students in the class, Andrea Brown was the one whose tweet was retweeted by Le Robert editors. She says the class "was a unique and fulfilling experience. It was an excellent opportunity to be able to connect with professionals through Twitter and be able to get an inside view of the world of networking. It was really neat to be retweeted by the dictionary."

Caws also taught a first-year course that term; she points out nearly every student in the other class was on Twitter, while only two-thirds of her 400-level students already were. She believes the difference is somewhat generational-if the two cohorts can be considered within such a tight timeframe.

"Three years for me is a generation when it comes to Twitter," she explains. "The concept of 'generation' in social media is very short."

And tweets tend to appear, and dissipate, as fast as birdsong. But because Brown's tweet came to the attention of a dictionary editor in France, now this UVic student has something to tell her own grandchildren-for whom online social connection will have evolved beyond all possible recognition by then.