With 10 minutes left of my Introduction to International and Global Studies lecture, I found myself slumping in my chair, checking the clock nearly every 5 seconds and praying with all my heart for the class to finally be over. I carefully surveyed my notes for the day and realized that I had been drawing doodles in the margins for the last half hour. When the professor posed a question to the class, I didn't even think to raise my hand because I knew that whatever I said would probably sound incredibly stupid and indicate quite clearly that I had not been paying attention to any of the discussion that had ensued for the past 50 minutes.

At long last, the clock struck 11, and I was out of the classroom before the professor could even get his closing words out of his mouth.

Although my complete loss of focus was quite unusual considering my typically studious disposition, a general lack of interest and engagement among college students is a far too common problem for both students and educators.

According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Teaching with Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart" by Jeffrey R. Young, the latest innovation for remedying this problem is using Twitter, an online social network, as a new form of forum for discussion in the classroom.

Several professors at colleges and universities across the country have been trying Twitter as a means of getting their students more involved in class discussions.

According to the article, the online forum emboldens quieter students to participate and ask questions via "tweets"-short 140-character posts that can be submitted via a laptop or cell phone.

In addition, it allows students to engage in an ongoing discussion about class material both inside and outside of the classroom.

Using Twitter as a classroom tool certainly seems like an interesting idea.

Admittedly, when I first read the article, I found myself wishing my IGS professor would adopt a similar system.

But on second thought, I realized that using Twitter in the classroom is actually detrimental to an esteemed academic environment.

Twitter is undoubtedly an effective way to get students engaged, but the problem is that students would be engaging the wrong skills.

One obvious downside to using Twitter in the classroom is that the open, unlimited access to this online forum draws students' attention away from the lecture.

According to the Chronicle article, in Prof. Sugato Chakravarty's consumer sciences and retailing class at Purdue University, the experimental Twitter project causes "a constant stream of comments, often tangential. . During one session . students took over the back channel to ask the professor to cancel class Thanksgiving week."

Clearly, the students are participating in this online discussion, but their chatter is often not related to the subject material at hand.

If a serious lack of focus is already a problem, it seems counterproductive for professors to then provide a forum for unmediated discussion in Twitter.

If Twitter is used as a tool for instruction, then students are given license to discuss anything they like, relevant to class or not, under the pretext of participating and paying attention.

So rather than encouraging active classrooom participation, professors are actually allowing their students' minds to wander through the distractions of the Internet with absolutely no consequence.

Another issue with Twitter as a forum for discussion, though perhaps one less obvious, is the limitations that the Web site places on students' ability to communicate and express themselves.

For one thing, tweets can only be 140 characters long. This seriously limits a student's ability to ask questions or make insightful comments.

Prof. Monica Rankin at the University of Texas addresses this limitation on her blog about her experience with Twitter.

During her Twitter experiment, she encouraged her students to use more than one tweet if necessary to get the whole point across.

But displaying a comment or question in segments still interrupts the thought processes of the student writing the comment and the person reading it, particularly if another tweet pops up in between the multiple parts of one comment.

With such limited space, Twitter definitely makes deep, analytical and meaningful class discussions, which are key to an excellent learning experience, more difficult if not impossible.

And of course, let's not forget the important skill of oral communication.

Twitter, which relies solely on comments and questions written by students in the class, takes the emphasis off of oral communication altogether.

Not every student is a stellar speaker, but there is a reason why oral communication is a core requirement at Brandeis.

The ability to effectively express oneself via oral communication is an extremely valuable skill both in the academic world and the professional world.

If less-outspoken students can use Twitter as a "get out of jail free" card to avoid speaking in class, they will never learn to effectively express themselves through speech.

There are probably several more reasons Twitter could be detrimental to an academic environment. Luckily, at present this popular social networking Web site isn't being used nearly enough in college classrooms to feel the effects of this detriment on the traditional academic setting.

One can only hope that professors will find a better way to draw their students into classes instead of relying on a distracting and limiting Web site.

Student apathy may be a huge problem in the classroom, but that is no reason to turn to Twitter, which does more harm than good.