Twitter enthusiasts are finding all sorts of ways to take advantage of the micro-blogging service. If you're not yet a Twitterer, here's how it works: You post short messages to your Twitter timeline that can be no more than 140 characters long. Your timeline is displayed at your Twitter home page (my Twitter posts, for example, are here). You can also choose to “follow” other Twitter accounts. “Following” an account makes it easier to keep track of those who you think post interesting Twitter content. You can sort those you follow into lists, get an account's Twitter feed via RSS, or use third-party apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite to manage all the Twitter content you want.
So with that:
An Oxford University history grad named Allwyn Collinson is using Twitter to 'live-tweet' the events of the Second World War as they are happening. He just started earlier this year which means that so far as his Twitter account @RealTimeWWII is concerned it is November, 1939 right now and the Russian army is advancing through central Finland. I talked to Allwyn about this project on my television program during Remembrance Day week. This Twitter account already has more than 165,000 followers (that's a lot in the Twitterverse).
Meanwhile, the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic, and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont. has set up the Twitter account @BattleOfOrtona where, next week, this Second World War battle — a bloody one where Canadian soldiers played a significant part — will be tweeted out in real-time. So far, this account has just 147 followers
In any event, regardless of the followers, I think this is a great way to teach history or get people interested in these events.
Some other “This Day in History” type of accounts you might like to follow: This Day in History and History Day