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Micro-Blogging and the Higher Education Classroom: Approaches and Considerations

Teaching Arts and Science with the New Social Media

ISBN: 978-0-85724-781-0, eISBN: 978-0-85724-782-7

Publication date: 22 March 2011

Abstract

This chapter offers reflections on the successes and failures of integrating the micro-blogging platform Twitter into a first-year university class. Twitter, intended as a way to answer the question “What are you doing?” is now used in originally unexpected ways. Broadly speaking, Twitter's popularity can be traced to three factors: conversation between users; a decentralized ecosystem of third-party applications; and as a result, the distributed nature of the users. Adopted by educators in higher education, Twitter has been used as: an object for study, a tool to communicating classroom announcements, as a way to enable student to reflect on their learning, a chance to get instant feedback from students, and as the specific tool used to facilitate in-class conversations. The ongoing use of micro-blogging also appears to have an ability to change the social dynamics of a classroom, expanding the social of the classroom beyond the physical. While identifying Twitter's limitations, the chapter outlines the most significant outcome from the author's integration of Twitter: an evolution of blended learning, proposed as a plesiochronous learning model, where learning occurs outside the classroom, with learner and instructor in different places but occurring at (virtually) the same time.

Citation

Watson, G.P.L. (2011), "Micro-Blogging and the Higher Education Classroom: Approaches and Considerations", Wankel, C. (Ed.) Teaching Arts and Science with the New Social Media (Cutting-Edge Technologies in Higher Education, Vol. 3), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 365-383. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2044-9968(2011)0000003021

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited