Are You Tweeting (in Class)?

Inside Higher Ed reviews the Twitter, etc., issue.

Excerpt: Harnessing Social Media

November 8, 2010

ORLANDO — In the age of social media, everyone is behind on the reading. There was always more potentially relevant information out in the world than people could ever hope to know. But Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites, and countless other content streams and conversation threads — constantly available in the era of wireless networks and mobile computing — have thrust many in academe into an endless, unwinnable race to keep up…

Beyond limiting the distractions of social media in their own lives, academics face the challenge of keeping students — who are equally awash in always-accessible information — focused. Here, some have bypassed moderation in favor of outright obstruction, banning laptops and mobile devices, and even going so far as attempting to shut off Internet access in the classroom. While some professors have championed the use of Twitter in class, others have dismissed it as an attention-bankrupting dalliance with little or no educational function.

But a new study, scheduled to be released next week by the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, suggests that using Twitter in class might in fact lead to greater engagement and higher grades — as long as professors harness their students’ urges to Tweet for “educationally relevant activities”: class discussions, asking questions, getting reminders from instructors, organizing study groups, and so on.

The students in the experiment, first-year pre-health majors (and Twitter novices), varied widely as far as how frequently they tweeted over the course of the 14-week semester — the median was 30 times and the mean was 48 — but overall their GPAs averaged half a point higher than those of the non-tweeting control group…

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/08/sloan3