Summary 3: Does Twitter have a role in education?

Twitter is described as a microblogging and social networking service in which users communicate with everyone by short messages (“Twitter”, n.d.). This description I find interesting, as I am certain the term “microblogging” did not exist when I first heard of Twitter in 2007, when a colleague described it as “Facebook status updates without Facebook”. This lead to a view that Twitter, with its “What are you doing?” prompt, was about “solipsism and sound-bite communication” (academHacK, 2008). However the use of Twitter has evolved, and is now used for professional and social interaction and communication. To reflect this, Twitter's promt was changed to “What's happening?” in November 2009. The question is, is there a role for Twitter in education?

Such a question can only be answered by knowing more about Twitter itself. When a user joins Twitter they create a profile from which they can start following other users and sending messages. The messages, called “tweets”, are short messages up to 140 characters in length. This limit is the same character limit on SMS messages for mobile phones, as users have the option to tweet to and from their phone. Tweets can contain a hashtag, a word or conjoined words preceded by the # character, to make all tweets containing that hashtag easier to find through search tools. When a user “follows” someone, they are essentially listening to that person's tweets. A user will also have followers, people who are listening to their tweets. The default privacy level of a Twitter account is that it is open to all, any internet user is capable of observing the profile and all tweets of an individual user. The alternative privacy level makes the twitterer's profile and tweets private only to approved followers.

The two big ideas for using Twitter in education are professional development and as a communication backchannel. The professional development use revolves around using Twitter to network with educators locally or around the world. By tweeting an idea, an educator can receive feedback from their network, in the form of comments or links to related content. Feedback could also be received from people outside of the network, such as professionals in the particular field of the idea. The educator is also able to reply to other peoples' ideas with their own thoughts. The Twitter4Teachers wiki (http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/) contains a large list of educators using Twitter, sorted by subject area. This list is publicly editable, and some teachers have included their location (I am now following three Australian maths teachers to see what they tweet), with some even including the name of their school. Professional discussions also occur through hashtag discussions, such as #edchat.

A backchannel is a communication channel which is used to provide feedback and ask questions of a presenter while they are giving a presentation (“Backchannel”, n.d.). Twitter is used at conferences as a backchannel, with hashtags provided to group the discussion. Currently, the ACEC: Digital Diversity conference in Melbourne is using the hashtag #acec2010 (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23acec2010), however the discussion has the most relevance to conference participants.

Twitter backchannels have been used in higher education institutions with some success. At one university students use the backchannel to ask questions, give comments and post related material, with the Twitter feed being shown during the lecture (Young, 2009). The professor has the ability to reply to questions or comments and explore related material provided by students. A different university has found that student participation in lecturers with large student numbers increased when they used a Twitter backchannel (Ferenstein, 2010). The university provided the option for non-connected students to give teacher assistants hand written thoughts and questions to be placed on the Twitter conversation. Participation in the Twitter conversation enabled students who did not like participating in vocal discussions to ask questions and contribute (Ferenstein, 2010; Young, 2009). Interestingly, discussion on the Twitter backchannel does not stop when the lecture stops, it continues going, particularly when “something came up outside of class that reminded them [students] of material from class time” (academHack, 2008, para 4).

Gallicano (2010) suggests using a Twitter backchannel only for large classes, as there are different techniques available for building relationships in small classes, and providing a guarantee to the students that questions on the backchannel will receive a response. These are important points, a student will not use a communication tool if they feel that they will be the only person using it. By guaranteeing they will get a response, students will be more likely to start using the tool and then start answering each others questions, leading to collaborative learning. There is then the possibility of positive interaction with external participants in the conversation, providing alternative input and feedback.

A common alternative use of Twitter in the classroom is using the open communication of Twitter to get a “sense of how varied are the things people are doing around the globe” (academHacK, 2008, para 6). This can be achieved through a tool such as Twitter's Public Timeline (http://twitter.com/public_timeline), which shows tweets as they happen, or TwitterVision (http://beta.twittervision.com/), which shows the public timeline tweets on a world map (for location specified tweets). A different option is that students, individually or as a class, could follow important people or organisations to receive updates on what they are doing or thinking. With the range of people and organisations on Twitter, these could provide an excellent source of information. However, the source might not always provide useful information, for example its one thing to find out when a space walk at the International Space Station is going to start (NASA, 2010b), but its another to find out which song was used for waking up the astronauts (NASA, 2010a).

Twitter has been used in an interesting collaborative task in which students from across the United States of America and Canada and classes from the United Kingdom, China, Qatar and Thailand produced a story (manyvoices, 2008). They used a single Twitter account and added to the story in one hundred and forty, 140 character pieces. Any online collaboration tool could have been used for this task, but Twitter was most likely used for the character limit. Other attempts at using Twitter in the classroom have had mixed success; Russell (2008) reported that her class enjoyed a task to use Twitter over a 48 hour time period, where as Melander (2008) reported that her class did transition from blogs to Twitter well. My concern over the previous two reports is that there was no objective or direction in their use of Twitter.

The privacy options of Twitter make a tricky situation for education. By opting to hide one's tweets, the advantages of contact with the wider community are lost. However it does mean that the privacy of the individual students is maintained in a safe environment. It may be that the use of Twitter in classes is decided at a school level where parent and teacher community can come to the most appropriate decision for that community. There are other microblogging services available for closed communities, such as Edmodo, Yammer and ShoutEm (Ritchie, 2009).

Twitter is a communication tool which, when used properly, can be used to assist with an interactive, participative and collaborative class. However, determining the way in which Twitter is used for a particular class may be difficult and time consuming. Even if Twitter can not be used in class, it still a extensive research for educator personal development and networking.



References

AcademHacK (2008, January 23) Twitter for Academia [web log post]. Retrieved from http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/

Backchannel (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 9, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel

Ferenstein, G. (2010, March 1) How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement, Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com

Gallicano, T (2010, January 30) In-Class Tweeting in a Large Lecture Class [web log post]. Retrieved from http://prpost.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/in-class-tweeting-in-a-large-lecture-class/

manyvoices (2008) @manyvoices. Retrieved from http://manyvoices.wikispaces.com/

Melander, N. (2008, December 5) 14 Days of Twitter Part One: “I Hate Twitter” [web log post]. Retrieved from http://digitalmindsblogger.blogspot.com/2008/12/14-days-of-twitter-part-one-i-hate.html

NASA (2010a, April 9) Wake up song at 8:51 p.m. EDT... [Twitter status update]. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/NASA/status/11853458636

NASA (2010b, April 9) STS-131 first spacewalk began at 1:31a ET... [Twitter status update]. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/NASA/status/11865719769

Ritchie, M (2009, April 24) Chirping about Twitter, TES Connect. Retrieved from: http://www.tes.co.uk

Russell, K.M. (2008, January 17) “48 Hours of Twitter” class assignment [web log post]. Retrieved from http://teachingpr.blogspot.com/2008/01/48-hours-of-twitter-class-assignment.html

Twitter (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 7, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Young, J (2009, April 8) Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class – via Twitter, The Chronicle. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com