We were asked to get involved with Twitter this week and to answer questions that the tutors posted using the tweet #mcsidel. I found this an interesting way of teaching and learning which was slightly challenging, being a novice to Twitter myself. I managed to reply to the incorrect person only once though and forgot using the hashtag once as well, but quickly discovered that it is possible to delete tweets as well which is very helpful. The experience from an educational perspective is an intriguing one, I think. During this course, we have had no face to face and relatively few synchronous interactions with our fellow students, but during the tweetorial it was possible to directly engage and challenge each other on the Twitter platform. I don’t completely agree with the idea of ‘social learning’ where students learn in groups and learn through participation (Brown & Adler 2008), but seeing other students’ and the tutors’ perspective on Twitter did help me think about the data science issues that were the topic of the tweetorial.

We were asked to analyse the tweets that came out of the tweetorial as well and I have added the figure for this below:

This shows who did most of the tweeting during the week and how all the conversations were connected. As can be expected, the tutors’ names are shown in the biggest font, having contributed most to the discussion and the rest of the tangle shows several big contributors and many with lower contributions. This made me wonder if the shy people on Twitter would be similarly shy in the traditional classroom or if the technology forms a barrier for some ‘digital immigrants’? (Bayne et al. 2020) During the last few months, there has been quite some discussion about learner participation online as opposed to traditional teaching, where some teachers seem to feel that there are more possibilities for shy students to come out of their shell online, without many eyes on them when they respond in the text box during a tutorial, for instance.

The barrier of technology is relatively low here, I think. Twitter is a straightforward enough platform to use, once you get used to it and I noticed that it is used by many academics for professional reasons, as opposed to Facebook, for instance. This seems to point in the direction of Twitter being a more serious platform, maybe and I wondered if the fact that Twitter is word based has made professional regard it in this way? It is of course possible to add pictures etc. to your tweets, but it is in essence a word based tool. This would also make it a more obvious choice for an educational platform, where students can express their opinions mostly in words, as most of the students did in the tweetorial. There were a few pictures and some links, but on the whole, the conversation was mostly done through text.

The educational experience of a tweetorial was enjoyable and engaging and it helped me process the readings in a more social context with the other students and the tutors.

Bayne, Sian, et al. The Manifesto for Teaching Online, MIT Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook

Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), pp. 16–32.

Tweetorial / Femke Morrison / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0