URBANA — Just before spring break, English teacher Steve Rayburn came up with a new way to approach an old classic.

Rayburn asked his Hero's Journey class, composed of juniors and seniors, to use Twitter to write about Dante's "Inferno," the 700-year-old epic about the poet's journey through the nine rings of hell.

Twitter is an increasingly popular microblogging tool that allows users to post short messages and updates — called "tweets" — that other people who have signed up as "followers" can read. (The Online Gargoyle has been using Twitter since August.)

These tweets, however, were to be written as if Dante were posting them for his love interest, Beatrice. Rayburn assigned his students to write 10 of these tweets, one for each of the nine rings of hell and then another from before or after Dante's journey.

What made this assignment so unique and difficult is that all Twitter posts — no matter what the subject — are confined to a maximum of 140 characters. This constraint forced students to think through their posts clearly and to get right to the point.

A sample tweet, from senior Rachel Hyman: "9th circle: frozen lake w/ traitors beneath. Fearful Lucifer had 3 faces, wings, & chomped on worst sinners. On to Purgatory. Thx Beatrice!"

"I would use it again," Rayburn said. "It got them engaged in the work and gave me some clear indication that they had read the work and knew what was going on, and it was a little different from the standard 'write an essay on Dante' kind of thing."

Shortly after the assignment was turned in, Rayburn got a bit of a surprise when a summary of his innovative assignment appeared at the beginning of a School Library Journal article titled "Twittering Dante."

It turned out that colleague and technology mentor Frances Harris, Uni's librarian, had told one of her friends on the staff of School Library Journal about the project, which led to the article. Even though he went unnamed in the piece, his brush with "anonymous fame" has only heightened Rayburn's interest in mixing traditional teaching techniques with new media.

"My wife thinks that I got cheated because they didn't give me credit for coming up with the idea," he said. "I told her that wasn’t the focus of the article, but she still felt like my name should be in there somewhere."

In fact the point of the article was to show how teaching styles can be changed so that students accustomed to communicating via Web 2.0 social media can engage in activities that seem more relevant to their everyday lives. Over the summer, Rayburn attended a National Writing Project workshop at the University of Illinois focused on doing just that.

Rayburn says that while it didn't affect his teaching style as much as he might have hoped, it did make him aware of the shift that is happening in today's education. In his first-semester Shakespeare class, for example, he challenged his students by having them do their traditional research projects on a Wiki site.

And he doesn't show signs of stopping.

"I think I could say that though Steve is not an 'early adopter,' he's insatiably curious and really interested in seeing what can be done with new technologies in ways that make sense and contribute to learning," commented Harris. "He's willing to experiment and be experimented upon."

Already the Hero's Journey class has been given a new assignment involving a Web site called Wordle. By entering a section of Faulkner's classic novel "As I Lay Dying," students will create a "word cloud" which will show which words are used most often. Students then write a response paper explaining their reactions.

But as Rayburn says, this is just him using the "laboratory" part of Uni's name to justify his new and above all enjoyable experiments.

Note: For more information about how new forms of social media are changing how writing is taught, see the recent National Council of Teachers of English report "Writing in the 21st Century."