Throughout the Distributed and Open Learning course, I have been using Twitter, a popular microblogging social networking site, as an open learning technology to engage with social learning communities. Founded in 2006, Twitter is a widely used social media where users freely upload “tweets” of up to 280 characters and distribute images, texts, or videos to their “followers”. Considering the followers can retweet the tweets to their own followers, it has been renowned as a social media where one can easily and widely disseminate information. I will be using criteria from the SECTIONS model to review my learning experiences on Twitter and evaluate the effectiveness of Twitter as a distributed and open learning platform.
Students
The very first thing to discuss is the demographics of the users of Twitter. According to Omnicore Group, a digital marketing agency, 34% of Twitter users are females and 66% are males while 80% of the total Twitter users are affluent millennials (Aslam, 2020). Based on these statistics, it is important to understand that two-third of the potential students of any social learning communities in Twitter would likely be male and aged between 20 to 40.
Twitter is one of the most widely used social media. It is extremely easy to access to the platform as long as users have access to the internet. One could easily make an account or even without an account, every tweet is viewable. Considering the fact that 4.4 billion people have access to the internet out of a total of 7.7 billion global population as of January 2019, Twitter is truly one of the most accessible online learning technologies (Kemp, 2019).
With respect to learning with Twitter, the students’ usage of Twitter seem greatly different from the major function of a university education, which is to develop skills of abstract thinking and to help students deal with complexity and uncertainty. Students use Twitter for six different educational purposes: 1) capture and representation, 2) communication, 3) collaboration, 4) class organization and management, 5) reflection and 6) assessment (Tang, Y., & Hew, K. F., 2017).
Ease of Use
How easy it is to use Twitter? Twitter has an extremely simplistic interface to either upload tweets or reads tweets. On the front page of Twitter after log-in, students can write texts/attach images or videos on the top area or read tweets/retweets from the people whom they follow below.
Since Twitter has strictly limited each tweet to be no more than 280 characters, 5MB of images, or 2 minutes and 20 seconds of videos, reading through tweets allows great visibility to the students. This also means that any educational information in Twitter tends to be greatly compressed and summarized, often accompanying with hyperlinks to the detailed version of the information. The extreme visibility and simple interface make Twitter one of the easiest social media platforms and online learning communities.
Cost
Twitter gets its profit from advertisements and it does not require any payments from its users. Every content (tweets) are free, and therefore, the conventional criteria of cost drivers are not effective to assess the cost of using Twitter as an educational tool since there are no visible costs in development, delivery, maintenance and overheads.
Teaching and Media Selection
Among Meyer’s 12 principles of multimedia design, signalling, redundancy, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity, segmenting, multimedia and personalization are highly related to the effectiveness of Twitter as an online learning tool. Personally, as a student, my educational purpose of using Twitter was to follow news in the capital markets most efficiently. Twitter provided me with an abundance of personalized multi-media information in highly simplistic and short learning design. Moreover, Twitter fits into two of Talbert’s key design principles; Simple and Short (UBC Wikis, 2014). When I hover around tweets, I could easily focus on one idea by searching for certain keywords or hashtags. All the contents are extremely short, up to 280 characters, 5MB images and 2 minutes and 20 seconds videos. However, it is hard to determine if the tweets are Real or Good because all the contents are uploaded without much planning or intentions.
Interaction
Unlike conventional textbook learning, Twitter is a tool that extremely encourages interactions between students and teachers. In fact, the boundary between the students and the teachers is vague since the exchange of information is multi-directional. Twitter can be determined as a Connectivist MOOC with the leanest control, unlimited number and size of classrooms, and communicative learning experience. Almost all interactions are user-generated and creators tend to deliberately design the work to encourage reflection and interpretation from viewers.
Organizational Issues
Twitter is not usually a platform that contains institutional educational resources, but it can help the readiness of instructors for teaching with technology by providing access to broader learning communities. For example, instructors at different colleges and universities could coordinate their use of Twitter, thereby creating a larger virtual community. For example, if Introduction to Economics were offered at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia during the same semester, then the professors teaching the courses could arrange the use of the same hashtag. This would help supplement regular classroom teaching and encourage class engagement in using Twitter. Considering the percentage of Twitter users on mobile is 80% (Aslam, 2020), creating virtual educational communities would be highly feasible by utilizing Twitter institutionally.
Networking (and Novelty)
From the example mentioned in the above paragraph, assuming that a large virtual community can be supplementing an institutional education, we can expect advantages of networking between students and instructors. In the Twitter thread, anyone can initiate to open and share educational resources and have a discussion with whoever in the online learning community. For example, as a student at the University of Victoria, I could use Twitter instead of the institutional education technology, “Coursespace”, to more quickly and easily communicate with peer groups and the instructor. In the “Coursespace”, I wouldn’t be able to post any contents unless the instructor would allow while on Twitter I could share and discuss any topics in the learning process.
Security and Privacy
There is a reason why Twitter would be a good “supplement” to conventional education. While both instructors and students need privacy for their works and opinions, Twitter might not be a good place to provide that. According to Gunuc, Misirli and Odabasi (2013), in a study that encouraged students to use Twitter for educational communication, the majority of students found Twitter not interesting and most of them quitted Twitter after the study. Students were worried about privacy since they preferred communicating with their friends in a more private channel.
Personally, as I’ve mentioned in the previous posting, Third Reflection, Twitter was a highly effective online learning tool for me for the purpose of following the news in the energy market and identifying the market trends and people’s opinions. It provided highly simplistic, personal and fast multimedia contents which improved my learning experience greatly. Unlimited communication among users should be the biggest benefit of using Twitter as online educational technology. It also has great potential to supplement conventional online learning designs by providing a tool for more effective communication between students and instructors. However, Twitter shows clear cons in terms of security and privacy issues. Since it does not feature exclusive spaces of communication, I believe it’s very unlikely that conventional institutions would freely use the technology to supplement their existing learning designs.
References
Aslam, S. (2020). Twitter by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts. From https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/
Gunuc, S., Misirli, O., & Odabasi, H. F. (2013). Primary School Children’s Communication Experiences with Twitter: A Case Study from Turkey. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16(6), 448e453. http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2012.0343.
Mayer, R. (2009). Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511811678
Tang, Y., & Hew, K. F. (2017). Using Twitter for Education: Beneficial or Simply a Waste of Time? Computers & Education, 106, 97-118. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.004
UBC Wikis (2014). Documentation: Design Principles for Multimedia. Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia
Wright, N., & Forbes, D. (2016). Twitter in Education. E-Learning and Digital Media, 13(1-2), 3-4. doi:10.1177/2042753016666424