Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Commentary: Twitter for educational networking

2009; Wiley; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bmb.20307

1539-3429

Graham R. Parslow,

Impact of Technology on Adolescents

Alan Lew [1], a professor of geography at Northern Arizona University, wrote in August 2007 that “Twitter is basically a potential alternative to email, instant messaging and discussion forums, as ways of communicating with students, and because it is fun to use, I may give it a try in my next class—after my current sabbatical. By then, however, Twitter may be old hat, replaced by something else.” Instead of being old hat, Twitter has increased in popularity to become the third most used social interaction forum after FaceBook and MySpace. Twitter is named in reference to a flock of birds twittering among themselves with each bird tweeting a short message to the others. The messages in Twitter are limited to 140 text characters per tweet, so it is not a medium for expressing deep philosophical insights. However, it is easy to have a web link embedded in the 140 characters of a tweet to quickly reach more information. It is commendably easy to open a Twitter account at twitter.com and when I did this I elected to follow the tweets from the BBC (UK), Time magazine, and Google news. This means that I see the latest 20 news stories from these organizations on my Twitter home page, presented as a headline with a link to the story. For example, “TIME: Millions of Pakistani refugees in limbo after fleeing the Taliban http://digg.com/d1sFTx.” Subscribers nominate other Twitters to follow and they can screen who is permitted to see their tweets. Searching by topic or key word can locate specific tweets. Many tweets include references to biochemistry including “More Biochemistry video lectures uploaded at http://bit.ly/1Gu1rf.” It is relatively simple to have a whole class subscribe to tweets from a teacher to learn of new activities such as “Talk today on metabolomics by Nobel prize winner, theatre 3 at 11 am.” The tweets can be sent to mobile phones as text messages as well as distributed via the web. This means that with relatively low-effort teachers can enable an extensive broadcast system. The students do the work to subscribe and provide their phone numbers. Because it is a multiway system, Twitter can be used as a classroom response system and responders might not even need to be in a lecture theatre. Field work can be conducted with instant feedback from a dispersed group. As a bonus to the teacher, the students provide their own response device and it is one that they nearly always have with them, unlike clickers [2]. Jack Dorsey (born 1977) created Twitter in 2006. As described in his biography [3], he was a precocious computer programmer, in the mold of Bill Gates, and created a program for taxi routing when he was just 14. He built a prototype of Twitter in about 2 weeks and the service has grown in popularity ever since. Dorsey has so far resisted allowing the commercial use of Twitter and has stood by his goal of simplicity in use. At the time of writing around 6 million people use Twitter and it is growing more rapidly than any other networking site. I asked my second year biochemistry class of 472 students how many knew what Twitter was (∼80% did), who had used Twitter (∼10% had), and who had used Twitter as part of a teaching exercise (only one individual). If the class had been set up to use Twitter, I could be more precise about such responses and I would have a record of the feedback. For the general community, Twitter is a way of using eye witnesses to report on local events. For example, local radio stations use Twitter to get traffic reports from grid-locked motorists. In the Mumbai terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel in November 2008 a stream of tweets told the world what was happening as the drama unfolded. My local area had wild fires that spread with lethal ferocity in February 2009 and Twitter warned people in the path of the fires more effectively than official emergency services. David Parry [4] from the University of Texas makes the point that if we do not adopt the technology of our students, we will be seen as irrelevant to their lives. Parry is clear that he is not advocating fraternizing with students, but using tools like Twitter to break down the social walls of conservatism that can hamper teaching. Geoffrey Cain [5] from the Tacoma Community College says that while Twitter is new there is nothing new about using social networks for teaching and learning. “Real change comes when these tools and networks become so ubiquitous that they begin to shape how we think and communicate” [5] a perception duly linked to Marshal McLuhan's assertion that the medium is the message. Not all of our students have embraced Twitter, as I found by asking my students and as David Parry also noted [4]. In reflecting on who is leading who, Cain [5] asserts that we have a responsibility to show students how to apply and use new media and Cain's colleague Sharon Gross adds “The point of teaching students to use social media isn't just to embrace a novel trend: it's to help students become literate in our networking-based society.” The phenomenal success of Twitter was not anticipated by its creator [6], but neither was the potential of an idea that Kary Mullis had when he showed how to perform polymerase chain reactions.