16
Nordiana Shah / Andrew M. Cox Information School E:lip11na@sheffield.ac.uk T:@dena_shah “TEL Fest 2014, 9th September - University of Sheffield” TWITTER for Teaching: through the research lens

Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Embed Size (px)

DESCRIPTION

Presentation TELFest2014

Citation preview

Page 1: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Nordiana Shah / Andrew M. CoxInformation SchoolE:[email protected]

T:@dena_shah

“TEL Fest 2014, 9th September - University of Sheffield”

TELFest2014 9 September 2014

TWITTER for Teaching:through the research

lens

Page 2: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Academics are facing complex challenges around increasing competition to produce more quality research, enhanced teaching, public engagement, rise of the academic ‘portfolio CV’, meeting institutional goals and the research excellence framework (REF) ~ Henkel 2000

Faces of Contemporary Academic

Traditional Academic

VS

Modern Academic

Page 3: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Why Academic Use Twitter?

Technology affordances

Networking

Public engagement

Academic Practice

Teaching Philosophy

Social media/Web experiences

Nature of Disciplines /Subject Teach

Institutional Policy/REF

Impact

Technology belief

Digital Profile

Page 4: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

• Building and Maintaining Professional Networks

• Engaged education and sharing best practices

• Information, resource, and media sharing• Expand learning opportunities beyond the

classroom• Requested assistance and offered suggestions• Engaged in social commentary (media, public)• Digital identity and impression management• Online Presence across multiple social

networks (Alderton et. al 2010; Velatsianos,

2011)

What Academics do on Twitter?

Page 5: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

“I can sit on this office and not leave for the whole day, because I have a lot to do; whereas  with twitter I can reach 800 people around the world in 30 seconds. I can do that with email, I can do that in a public lecture, I can do that in the paper I have written, so it’s an immediate way of touching lots of people, and I think as an academic we have a duty to have a dialogue and connect with people, and it’s just another tool to do that.” [academic C]

Research Perspectives and Practices

Page 6: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens
Page 7: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Tweet in

General

Tweet for Research

Tweet for

Teaching

Three Types of Tweeting in HE

Page 8: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Twitter Spectrum from Research Literature

Discussion and Communication(hashtags #)

(Wakefield et al. 2011)

Learning Community (Informal and Formal)

(Kop et. al., 2011)

Collaborative Learning(@ individual, pair, group)

(Junco, Heiberger & Loken 2011)

Backchannel‘Twitter Wall’

(Costa et al., 2009)

Documentation and Information Retrieval

(Ebner et at. 2009)

Mobile Learning

(Grosseck & Holotescu 2009; Al-Khalifa 2010)

Information Transmission and Resource Sharing

(e.g. url,videos) Letierce et al, 2010; Fenner 2010)

Connecting with people

(Dunlap and Lowenthal 2009)

Reflection and memorisation of

concepts(Stephen et. al 2012)

Page 9: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Twitter as ‘email’ for communication

Twitter as ‘discussion board’ in classroom and outside

Twitter as medium for ‘work-group discussion’

Twitter ‘quick reply and immediate’

Twitter- ‘time management’ tool with continues communication’ beyond classroom

Twitter feeds encourage students to learn, participate and communicate their views.

Twitter in Pedagogy Philosophy

Good Practice of using Twitter

Twitter as a ‘reminder’ to students: communicate academic work, projects, class activities, preparation before class

(Chickering and Gamson, 1987)

Page 10: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

SWOTLight chatter, informal,

quick chatter, immediacy, unlimited divergent,

contemporary young, ease of use, networked connected, open

communication, non-institutional (unlike MOLE, Blackboard), social media

Length restriction, social network, less flow

interaction ,

Boost confidence, employability, student engagement, improve

feeling isolation, plethora of tools (tweetdeck, hootsuites, storify)

Time-waste, distraction in class, inappropriate comments, privacy issues, user familiarity,

personal use, International students may be somewhere

else (e.g. Sina Weibo), Writing “publically” is hard, information flood

Twitter

Page 11: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

“I can use this hashtag #ABC reporting, to bond a conversation and I’ve got over a thousand people following me purely because of this hashtag. At the weekend, I picked up a hundred extra followers in two days because academics and other universities were saying, “Hey, (name) is providing all this useful feedback on this exam. Join in…and it’s also...it means that students could participate in a conversation so as I make these points, if they don’t quite understand them, they can ask me what I mean. So rather than have a long, boring, lecture theatre conversation in which I’m trying to push out lots and lots of points, one after another, I can just push them out in small bites through Twitter, which is what I was doing across the weekend and what I’m still doing now.” [academic S]

Research Perspectives and Practices

Page 12: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Research Perspectives and Practices

“students if they use the hashtags the students can support each other and answer each other’s questions and they can also see the answers I am giving to other people {…} so it means I don’t get the same questions coming up time and again because there are all there and people can look at the hashtags and people can see what is going on so it was a nice way to use to put the energy that I wouldn’t normally spend in writing whole loads of great long email to people that only one person’s benefits from, I have actually spending less time but more productively so I could support the students during their revision through twitter in a way that I couldn’t support them through email because it is closing [one-to-one communication], it is one to one thing where as twitter is like one to many or many to many it depends on how you view it. I find it really useful…” [academic W]

Page 13: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

“Twitter has great potential to capture those fleeting moments of relevance to a module that happen outside the classroom because in terms of face-to-face contact time, students in the Humanities have very few. The idea is that all the other hours they’re furiously studying in the IC and Western Bank, of course they are, but it would be great to be able to extend that time virtually and capture those moments where you have a question. A question pops into your head or you see something that might be of relevance or interest and you tweet it...Not only do you share it with perhaps what you would hope to be an online community of people on the same module as you but also you archive it in a way. I suppose you archive that moment because you can go back through your tweets and see what was that Guardian article I thought was really good or what was that question I was thinking of?” [academic P]

Research Perspectives and Practices

Page 14: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

I tweeted last night, “Good luck to everyone sitting their exam. Tomorrow I’ll be thinking of you” and I am thinking of them and she replied going, “Oh, thanks”, so there’s been dialogue… [academic A]

Research Perspectives and Practices

Page 15: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

Lesson Learned

(1)Provide scaffolding; (explain #ABC123, following, @mention use!)

(2)Establish clear aims and objectives of Twitter activity for classroom use;

(3)Address students privacy; (options use personal or open new Twitter account)

(4)Model a good example of using Twitter; (e.g.

lecturer’s account or other professionals) and (5)Encourage continuous student participation

in the Twitter community. (6)Assess

• Discipline appropriate activities, yet recognises conventions of Twitter (cf Hattem 2013)

• Class size/settings (UG-PGT) /students’ ethnic backgrounds/facilities/activities

Page 16: Twitter for Teaching: through the research lens

“Technology is not something that happens to us. It is something we create”