If brevity is the soul of wit, Shakespeare would have loved Twitter.

Maybe that's why University of Calgary English professor Michael Ullyot has chosen the micro-blogging platform to stoke student discussion of the Bard.

This year, his English 205 students will be required to sign up for a Twitter handle and post at least six questions about the course material using the hashtag #engl205.

Ullyot said he hopes the program will help him "get a better sense of where their minds are."

"It's more intellectual, more substantive. People think Twitter is stupid. So is TV, but you have PBS. So is radio, but you've got NPR," he said.

It's a way of pushing the course material into the virtual space his students already inhabit.

Although Ullyot wears a crisp striped shirt and works in an ordered office filled with books and framed manuscripts, he also blogs and owns an iPad.

He's a hybrid professor, teaching an author whose works have straddled ancient and modern conditions over the centuries.

Shakespeare has always been used in pop culture and marketing.

"He's been at the forefront of a lot of technological change over the years," Ullyot says. The first movies and television shows borrowed heavily from Shakespeare, and continue to do so.

"I'm not dumbing it down, I'm making it interactive and that's what his theatre was originally," the professor said.

The students will have to tweet in their off-hours, however.

Ullyot had considered running the Twitter feed as he was teaching, but decided against it.

"I haven't figured out how to do that in a structured enough way," he said.

The real demon: "I don't want the students to multitask."

He believes, strongly, that if "you're going to read a book, you should sit down and read a book."

JGERSON@CALGARYHERALD.COM

Alberta topped all jurisdictions in North America for labour market performance over the last five years, according to a report released Thursday by The Fraser Institute.

Measuring Labour Markets in Canada and the United States: 2011 Edition, which ranks the performance of labour markets in 10 Canadian provinces and 50 American states, is a composite measure of labour market performance based on five equally weighted indicators: average total employment growth, average private sector employment growth, average unemployment rate, average duration of unemployment, and average labour productivity.

The report said Alberta’s strong performance enabled it to achieve the highest overall score of 9.0 out of 10.