Most of the work has been completed on our virtual team project and we will be submitting our completed document next week. We designed a Twitter User Guide and our aim was to create a guide that would help a new user get setup and start using Twitter. While it’s not perfect, I think the end product is a useful document. We choose this topic as only one person on the team had used Twitter previously and he was a recovering twitterholic who had mixed feelings on the platform. The rest of us had just set ourselves up and weren’t quite sure what we were doing.
Now that I have been using it for almost two months I’ve started to think about Twitter as a learning tool for students. There has been some research on this topic and it is getting more popular in third-level colleges.
I like twitter a lot more than I thought as I’m not a fan of social media. I can see the value of using this tool in our course. It broadens horizons as different students have different backgrounds and will gravitate towards certain topics to post each week. Its brilliant to see such a broad range of interesting topics and I have lots of tweets ‘liked’ to read later when I have more time. I’d love if the application had a ‘keep’ or ‘favourites’ button rather than ‘like’ to bookmark these, it would be a little less judgmental.
The timeline also annoys me, is it ever in sequence? Apart from those two little criticisms I find Twitter is so easy to use which makes it a good choice for students, it shouldn’t stress them out too much. It’s defiantly a great networking tool, you can follows others in the industry and develop a professional identity. Is it a good learning tool?
E-Leariningindustry.com says that it is a good tool to engage people who like social media and the mobile version makes it really accessible. I love the fact that if you have 10 minutes to spare anytime of the day or night, you can browse, send a tweet and complete your weekly twitter assignment. I also think it would be really useful for communication on a course where there is no VLE.
Eva Kassens-Noor, an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University completed an exploratory study on using Twitter to enhance learning in higher education in 2012. Third-level colleges were encouraging staff to use Twitter to “enable interactivity, excite learners and foster greater student participation”. She examined if it aids in-class learning. She looked at how students apply, create and retain knowledge when using Twitter compared with more traditional methods.
She discovered that in some contexts Twitter will better aid students to learn compared to more traditional methods, however, in other contexts it would hinder them. She felt it worked well for engaging students in theory and practice focusing on real-world examples. In contrast if the instructor intends to foster critical, in-dept and self-reflective thinking among students, Twitter would be unsuitable.
I think that Twitter can be a powerful tool for educational purposes. We have created a really useful community of learning that I hope will continue past the assignment completion date.
References
| Kassens-Noor, E. (2012) ‘Twitter as a teaching practice to enhance active and informal learning in higher education: The case of sustainable tweets’, Active Learning in Higher Education, 13(1), pp. 9–21. doi: 10.1177/1469787411429190. |
Minister, L. (2014) Using twitter as a learning tool,
elearningindustry.com, available at: https://elearningindustry.com/using-twitter-learning-tool
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