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A good news Monday in my fourth-year journalism class, JOUR4000, would in a perfect world, involve every student getting an A, paid internship offers, and then told never to come back for the 8:30 a.m. start time.

We weren’t lucky enough to all get A’s or internships on Monday March 15, but instead, our class Twitter hashtag became the number one, most popular topic in all of Canada.

By definition, a Twitter hashtag is “a community driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.” They can be funny (e.g. #epicfail) or serious (e.g. #iranelection) but in our case, we identify our class with a simple “#j4k.”

Students developed the hashtag in September as a way to discuss the events of the class each day, but this past week it was taken to another level.

During an in-class presentation the political reporting class included a live-tweeting segment, where by using “#j4k” in each post, the rest of us would be able to follow along.

Members of the political reporting class including Dean Tester, Margaret Cappa, Chris Cooper, and Brett Ruskin spearheaded the idea. It created such a buzz amongst students that due to the rapid posting of Tweets, “#j4k” became the most talked-about topic in all of Canada by the time the presentation was completed.

“People in the class were all doing it; it really got everyone to actively participate. And even if they weren’t Tweeting, we had the stream up on the screen for everyone to follow along,” explained Tester. “It showed how successful using Twitter could be to interact with a crowd while making a presentation.”

At the time, more Canadians were tweeting about “#j4k” than about “#rolluptherim,” including CBC political reporter Kady O’Malley.

“No one predicted it would get to be this successful. We still don’t know what it takes to be a trending topic in Canada, but it was a lot of fun,” said Tester.

It’s interesting to see that the Tweets mirrored those that one may see if they were to follow any normal day of Tweets from the House of Commons. There were comments about the issues that were presented of course, but also some comments about students’ chosen outfits, etc.

Shortly after class ended the news broke, on Twitter of course, that “#j4k” was not only just a trending topic in Canada, but it had in fact been the number one trending topic for a while too.

This invoked a sense of a pride in many class members that only a 21^st century journalist could feel, as various Twitter postings congratulated “the J-Class of 2010.”

The hashtag, which started out as a fun class experiment turned out to be something much more than that on March 15, as other classmates, professors, and the social media world witnessed.

Next week we may have to go back to paying attention in class though, and go easy on the Tweeting.

I think our secret is out.