Finding a Place for Twitter in Higher Education
May 20, 2010
As one of the hottest web 2.0 technologies, Twitter has recently flourished in its number of registered users. Amazingly, nearly 73 percent of all Twitter users have joined the service in the first five months of 2009. This Twitter trend can and should be utilized to benefit education.
As has been reported previously in several case studies and articles presented in eLearn Magazine ("Twitter in Academia", "Capture the Backchannel", "Learn from Rogue Tweeters"), Twitter has various educational uses in both developing countries and more developed ones. But the real tipping point for Twitter in education will only come if teachers can manage to add Twitter to their arsenal of teaching tools. The question is can they do it?
The question of whether teachers could and would adopt Twitter was raised in a recent survey called "Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today's College Faculty," launched by the Faculty Focus team in July 2009.
The survey covered nearly 2,000 higher education professionals in the United States. The questions varied between personal opinions (what, how, and why) and inquiries about potential uses of Twitter for education. The demographics of the sample included professors, online instructors, academic leaders, and individuals.
Alarmingly, the survey results show that more than half the surveyed faculty members think Twitter has no future in academia or potential use in higher education!
These same faculty members criticized Twitter for being a waste of time and contributing to the poor writing habits of students. Another problem with Twitter, they reported, is that it comes with some dicey privacy and security issues.
Regardless of the criticism, Twitter's remarkable growth among the millennium generation should be enough to secure its place as a teaching tool in higher education. Reading through comments that respondents wrote in response to open-ended questions in the Faculty Focus portion of the survey, it's clear that Twitter can indeed be used to solve some of the most pressing issues higher education professional faces, such as:
- collaboration (between colleagues, in group meetings)
- communication
- between teacher and student, student and student, teacher and parents
- as a conference backchannel
- for job posting
- to circulate department news
- tools
- as a personal learning environment/personal learning network
- as a virtual office
- to post assignments
- for language learning
- for class participation
- to track attendance
- to stay abreast of current issues in a given field
Despite these potential uses of Twitter in education, there are situations in which Twitter, as a medium falls short. The restricted number of characters used in a message, or tweet, limits users from explaining complex concepts or writing equations. Also, the amount of spam in Twitter and the shallow information disseminated each day, and figuring out how to wade through it or ignore it, is another impacting factor.
Clearly, as the survey explicates, Twitter is not adequate for everyone in academia. However, if you are a passionate teacher who wants to utilize new technologies in the classroom, Twitter can be an amazing, asynchronous communication medium — if and only if you have a strong network to follow.
We cannot stop the fast technological advancement in the web, but we can cope with the new generation evolving requirements in a meaningful way.
About the Author
Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa is an assistant professor at the Information Technology Department, CCIS, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She is also an advisory board member for this web site. She received her MSc degree in Information Systems (2001) from King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA, and her PhD degree in Computer Science (2007) from Southampton University, U.K. Al-Khalifa has participated with more than 45 research papers in symposiums, workshops, and conferences and has published many journal articles. Since 1999, she has also worked as a technology writer in Al-Riyadh Arabic daily newspaper, and she moderates an Arabic blog called tech2click.net, which contains information about new trends and technologies in e-learning and online. Her areas of interest include web technologies (semantic Web/Web 2.0), technology enhanced learning (e-learning, adaptive hypermedia), computers for people with special needs, and Arabic language and computers.
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