‘What’s happening?’: Students’ use of Twitter in a Social Media seminar
Nicola Pallitt
PhD (Media Studies) student
Centre for Film & Media Studies
University of Cape Town
@nicolapallitt
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to provide examples from a seminar on social media to promote discussion around integrating social media in higher education. It provides a content analysis of student tweets, finding classroom chatter to be the dominant genre of tweeting. While these tweets may seem trivial, it highlights how students used Twitter to create a classroom community online. Twitter may be regarded as a ‘backchannel’ for student centred teaching that challenges traditional classroom models by ‘flipping’ the classroom (Bergmann & Sams 2007). This paper is also relevant to Media Education scholars more specifically, as it considers how students’ existing uses of Twitter present a challenge for educators who wish to develop Twitter as media practice and encourage its journalistic use. While the potential for journalistic tweeting exists, students’ existing practices with this communication channel for entertainment and sociality present a challenge.The paper provides a case study for educators who wish to integrate social media into their existing teaching practices and encourages a closer consideration of the interplay between the educator’s aims,students’ existing uses of the platform, genres of tweeting and default values of the platform when integrating Twitter into higher education teaching and learning activities.
Keywords: Twitter, social media, higher education, student centred teaching, flipped classroom, genres of tweeting, media education
Introduction
Discussions of educational technological in higher education are often limited to institutional use of learning management systems (LMSs) where the online environment is restricted to students and educators. Twitter on the other hand, is a public social media platform not intentionally designed for educational use. When harnessed for teaching and learning, it can create both fruitful disturbances to traditional models of teaching and learning as well as dilemmas.
Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows users to send 140 character length messages to followers, much like sms. The hash (#) symbol, referred to as a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. Social media equipped classrooms may have a separate screen projecting tweets for a particular course where students tweet questions to a lecturer, much like tweet displays at conferences. However, hashtags can also be used in classrooms without a screen to display tweets. Students can use a designated class hashtag to search classmates’tweets, engage in conversation, share resources and ask the educator questions. This creates a classroom backchannel and online community.Currently, little academic research exists on how hashtags have been used to create this backchannel as an alternative to during lecture display. While there is much literature on the integration of teachnology in higher education, very little research exists on social media platforms other than blogs. Pimpare and Fast (2008) argue that“blogging can build community and encourage interaction and engagement that might otherwise not take place; [and] create space for studentsʼ voices to emerge when they otherwise might not” (2008). Similarly, Twitter may be regarded as a space for students to create an online community that unlike the university’s official online learning environments, is largely constructed by students for one another and facilitated by the educator. Currently, university online learning environments emphasise the distribution of resources such as lecture slides and support student engagement as secondary through added features (such as chatrooms, forums, wikis, blogs), whereas use of social media platforms start with dialogue and may link to resources as secondary.
Social media flipping classrooms and challenging academic and classroom discourse
The flipped classroom model was pioneered in 2007 by two high school chemistry teachers from Colorado, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. In contrast to traditional learning models where educators lecture students and assign homework to be completed by students on their own after class, the flipped classroom model is one where educators pre-record lectures for students to watch at home before class, giving them the opportunity to do homework with an instructor and their classmates present the following day (Martin 2011). Despite different technologies, the core idea is that students are able to ask questions when they arise. Depending on how it is used, Twitter may be considered as a variation of the flipped classroom model, as students and educators can respond to questions in a ‘just in time’way. Educators can also scaffold preparation for a particular theme by tweeting links to blog posts or YouTube videos which invite engagement around a topic or assignment in a conversational way before it is covered in the classroom.
The conversational style of tweets challenges academic discourse by making knowledge available in an informal way. It also offers an alternative to the one-to-many model of teaching to a many-to-many model online, as both students and educators contribute to the class tweetstream to share opinions or resources or comment on tweets. In this way, informal learning can play a role in formal education by providing an engaging backchannel.
This backchannel also encourages a sense of community amongst participants, but whether or not this may be considered as a learning community more specifically is a matter of debate.
“Learning community... consists of the feelings of community members regarding the degree to which they share group educational norms and values and the extent to which their educational goals and expectations are satisfied by group membership”(Rovai & Wighting, 2005). In this study, some student tweets suggest social goals rather than educational ones which demonstrate how the construction of Twitter as a learning community was not uniform amongst tweeters.
The role of social media in media education
Social Media courses are slowly being recognised as playing an important role in the training of Media Studies students in Higher Education. Australia’s Griffith University made Twitter education part of the mandatory courseload for journalism students owing to increasing demands from employers for new hires well-versed in social media (Dybwab, 2009). Despite such efforts, the ‘Twitter fluency’ of students is hard to measure. Educators need to consider how their students’domestication of the platform (i.e. existing media practices) may constrain their use of journalistic genres of tweeting.
Twitter has great potential as a journalistic tool: for broadcasting updates, finding sources or even alternative ways of framing stories based on what the public are saying about particular news events. One can also include links to other websites or online media such as YouTube, which is one way to show credibility or to expand on one’s tweet.
Although Twitter has become an essential part of many the modern journalists’ toolkit, some educators criticise the use of Twitter in their journalism classroom as a waste of time.Others think that teaching about it makes them ‘cutting edge’. However, lecturers often teach social media in a case study manner, focusing on specific events (such as the Arab Springs) rather than practical use of the platform to develop journalistic skills: teaching the ‘what is’rather than the ‘how to’.
Using Twitter as part of a teaching and learning environment involves more than the platform itself.Tweeting may provide students with a way to exercise their “writing rights” (Kress, 2004): instead of academic writing submitted in an essay format to a lecturer, student writing enters the public domain and has a real-world audience. Much of student writing in Higher Education is dominated by academic discourse which is very different to the kind of writing students are expected to do when they enter the media industry. Additionally, the 140 character limit of tweets requires students to practise their editing skills. Columnist Ivo Vegter, who writes for The Daily Maverick argues that Twitter helps train journalists to write concisely (Bischof, 2011). Tweets are a good way for media students to practise writinglead sentences and headlines.
In contrast to Media Studies lecturers, journalists see tweeting as an important daily practiceand argue that students need to learn how to hone and develop their tweeting skills. One such journalist is Mandy Wiener[1]. She tweeted the courtroom proceedings of the Jackie Selebi and Glen Agliotti trials and received a commendation in the 2011 Legal Journalist of the Year awards (Bischof, 2011). She believes that her concise reporting made court reporting more accessible to the public. In relation to trial reporting, she argues that Twitter is essential for breaking news. While students understand the relevance of Twitter in this context, their own use tells a different story.
Twitter in the seminar context
The seminar was titled ‘Survivor Social Media’and ran once a week for two hours. It was the third time I had taught this seminar for second year Media Studies students as part of their ‘Writing and Editing in the Media’course. The seminar consisted of 21 students and two seminar facilitators, me and fellow PhD student, Jaqui Hiltermann. Students’ tweets counted 10% towards their seminar mark. They were not taught how to tweet explicitly, yet the assessment outline was quite clear about what their marks would be based on:
Start a Twitter profile and follow the seminar handle. Please add the seminar hashtag (#fam2000f) to each tweet related to seminar content. Do NOT treat your twitter account as a rehash of your Facebook statuses. Your first tweet needs to best describe you – introduce yourself in 140 characters! Post tweets about weekly seminar readings, social media news and current events. Reply, follow and be followed by seminar members. Shorten URLs, and use tags and mentions appropriately. No hate speech, slander or spam. Please keep a Twitter diary (i.e. Word document where you paste your tweets) – despite online archival tools, anything can go wrong. You are responsible for keeping a record of all your tweets.
Twitter use in the seminar was intended for reflexive practice – using social media to study social media.During the seminar, students were told not to tweet about what they ate for breakfast, but to share ‘newsworthy’ information. They were shown how to use bit.ly to shorten URLs so that they could use their 140 characters more economically. We discussed the importance of hashtags, mentions and retweets. A preferred journalistic genre of tweeting was implied by the outline, but students’ choice of genre was not policed, as there are no wrong and right ways to tweet (this depends on the kind of information that is being tweeted about). The main aim was to get them to use Twitter to understand the platform and witness its journalistic potential even if they did not tweet in a journalistic way themselves. Twitter played a role in challenging classroom discourse, as seminar members had the potential to start their own conversations around social media and ask one another for advice in addition to their seminar leaders.
Methodology
I collected students’ tweets for the duration of the seminar by running a TAGS[2]script in Google spreadsheets. The script was set to automatically collect all students’ tweets that included the seminar hashtag. This paper is based on student tweets for the first 6 weeks of the seminar. 668 tweets were coded using the following categories: social media, current events, entertainment news, UCT news, interesting link or fact, seminar chatter, self promotion and personal. These categories were informed by my pilot study of student tweets from the previous years’ student tweets. These categories also suggest different genres of tweeting.
NodeXL was used to represent the students’ usernames and the coding categories as nodes to provide an overview of the content of the tweets. Node XL is a Microsoft Excel template (free and open source) that provides a range of basic network analysis and visualization features (Hansen et al., 2009). Network relationships (graph edges) are represented as an edge list containing pairs of vertices connected in a network (Hansen et al., 2009).The vertex metric of degree was used to calculate and compare the volume of different kinds of tweets according to the coded categories.
Additional tools included Archivist[3] which allows one to keep an archive of tweets related to particular hashtags and summarises data as graphs and pie charts to show the number of retweets in relation to original tweets, the kinds of websites most commonly linked to in tweets, the percentage of tweets sent from a mobile phone or desktop computer, and so forth. This tool allowed me to notice that half of all student tweets were sent from a BlackBerry device, suggesting that tweeting for the seminar formed part of students’existing mobile practices.
Representing students’Twitter usernames in a network graph necessitates asking students for signed permission. I told students about my academic project and asked them to sign a form agreeing to participate in the study. I assured them that while particular tweets would be used as examples, these would not be linked to their Twitter usernames. Although the network diagram does show usernames, it is used to represent the content of their tweets as a class rather than individual features. However, students who were friends of the social media students also got involved and used the seminar hashtag as well as organisations or individuals who were mentioned in student tweets and retweeted these tweets. I later realised that I had not obtained permission from these individuals and therefore decided against using the graph in this paper. Instead, I have chosen to display the vertex metric of centrality of particular tweet categories numerically in the following section (see Table 2).Zimmer (2010) discusses whether it is ethical to harvest public Twitter accounts without consent, noting that researchers are not in complete agreement. For many social science researchers, informed consent is a necessity whether research with human subjects occurs face-to-face or as part of an online social network like Twitter.
After doing a content analysis of students’tweets, I interviewed the students about the findings in the form of a class discussion. This qualitative dimension was crucial, as discussions provided evidence for why students tweeted about particular things in a certain way and why some went against the Tweeting assignment brief.
The tweet archive
Student tweets for the first six weeks of the seminar can be summarised as follows:
Social Media / 127Current Events / 98
Entertainment News / 106
UCT News / 38
Interesting link or fact / 53
Seminar chatter / 166
Self promotion / 32
Personal / 48
Table 1: Summary of 668 student tweets according to category.
The volume of tweets for the different categories indicates that students mostly used Twitter for seminar chatter. This shows that Twitter may be good for challenging traditional classroom discourse, as students inform and share information with one another. It is good to see that students generated a large number of ‘Social Media’ tweets, as this involved sharing information on the latest articles, news, trends and commentary about social media. This was one of my aims as seminar facilitator: I wanted students engage in Tweeting as a social media practice to learn more about the diversity of social media, teaching one another through sharing related information. It is important to remember that students did not all contribute equally and that certain individuals were responsible for more tweets of a particular genre than others.
This is where the vertex metric of centrality (or degree) in NodeXL is useful, as it can be used to calculate which code was most popular across all participants. Rather than content analysis, SNA tools such as NodeXL allows one to see one’s data from different perspectives, such as from the point of view of centrality for example. ‘Seminar chatter’ was the most prominent, followed by ‘Social Media’, ‘UCT News’ and ‘Interesting link or fact’, ‘Current Events’ and ‘Entertainment News’, ‘Self promotion’ and lastly, ‘Personal’.
Social Media / 19Current Events / 13
Entertainment News / 13
UCT News / 16
Interesting link or fact / 16
Seminar chatter / 28
Self promotion / 12
Personal / 11
Table 2: Codes calculated as degree.
Discussion of findings
Classroom as community: Seminar chatter
Students used Twitter to ask classmates for help, offer advice and maintain a sense of community.The following tweets were sent around the time that students were preparing for their digital story assignment where they have to make a short video about a student society:
Anyone having trouble getting their footage from a digital camera onto their mac, you need an iLink from an apple store #fam2000f
anyone know a place where i can get music from our age? NOT ROYALTY MUSIC #fam2000f
i love being in humanities. just did a whole project running around with my camera :) #fam2000f
#FAM2000F Anyone else stressing about the digital story? Hardly a vacation!