Twitter finally gains academic approval

By Davey Winder
Sunday, 22 November 2009 18:19

Training

So you think Twitter is just a 140 character waste of time? Maybe you should think again, universities in Australia and the UK have.

Having been a relatively early adopter of Twitter, my @happygeek account first saw the light of day in February 2007, you might expect me to say that I do not consider it a waste of time. However, you might imagine that the hallowed halls of academia would take a somewhat less enthusiastic view of 140 character networking.

Yet just last month the powers that be at Griffith University thought it a serious enough medium to be made a compulsory part of the journalism courses it offers. One senior lecturer even suggesting that essay writing was possibly no more beneficial than posting to Twitter.

Certainly in the field of journalism one can understand the benefit of getting students up to speed with social media, including Twitter, when there is an ever increasing demand from potential employers for just such an awareness and hands-on experience.

Maybe this is just confusing popularity, and there is no denying how popular Twitter is right now with over 5 billion Tweets posted. That said, there is certainly merit in considering Twitter as a powerful voice for citizen journalism and political opinion shaping.

But what about the general student population, where is the academic benefit for them? Over in the UK there have been cases reported of universities using Twitter as a method of communication to alert students when lectures were cancelled but precious little coming from the professors concerning Twitter as an academic medium.

Until now, that is. The University of Leicester reports that online blogging via Twitter plays an effective role in academia and acts as an exceptional communication tool.

The 'Twittering the Student Experience' study reveals that using Twitter not only helped develop peer support among students, especially when assessment deadlines or exam revision were concerned, but also as a personal learning network.

Students were able to use Twitter as a learning network at those times when they physically isolated from their peers, proving to be an invaluable resource at times of great educational need.

But the researchers also found that Twitter was more than just a glorified trendy chat-room, it was also being used as a very real data collection tool to help assess and record the student experience for want of a better term.

Dr Alan Cann, of the Department of Biology, who led the study said: "The academic departments involved in the study were so impressed with the affordances of Twitter that they have continued to use it in their pedagogic academic practices".

As a direct result of Dr Cann’s experiment plans are being developed to work with other bodies in the University such as the Student’s Union to promote the use of Twitter as a lightweight communication channel in the coming academic year.

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