Journal #3 - Twitter in Education

Objective:

Summarizes the article in Emerging Education Technology titled "More than a third of Higher Education Faculty are on Twitter " and a report titled "Twitter in Higher Education 2010: Usage Habits and Trends of Today's College Faculty". Simply restating the info that was in this publication. Highlights that were discussed in the videoblog were:

·      Statistics on the increase of use of twitter in higher ed

·      Reasons for using twitter

·      Reasons why not to use twitter

·      100 ways to use twitter post has the most hits and most popular

Reflective:

My first impression was that the blog part of it was pretty weak. The author, it seems just re-read what he thought was most important parts of the articles that he used. I read the article that talked about in the video as it was difficult to follow without reading the articles. Based on the research it would seem that social media (Twitter) is becoming more commonly used in education. Most of the research points towards more faculty using Twitter in various ways. The testimonials from faculty showed consistency in the use in their teaching.

Interpreted:

I think the main message with this piece is how we can use Twitter in education based on research and what faculty are saying about it. It may be intended to convince us that we should be using twitter as a lot of the focus was on reading the testimonials word for word from the article.

Decisional:

Im not at all convinced with using twitter. Social media may have become tbe most trendy tool, it is also a tool that is primarily used to push out information to a mass audiences. Therefore i am not sure how the classroom can be seen as a marketing tool to push information out. Social media is essentially marketing. Faculty can benefit from connecting with others in the sector and to a smaller extent perhaps students can as well but at this time i have not been able to see how it can be effectively used in the curriculum.

Reference:

Walsh, K (2010). Emerging Education Technology. More than a third of Higher Education Faculty are on Twitter. Retrieved July 12, 2012 from http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/10/more-than-a-third-of-higher-education-faculty-are-on-twitter/

Walsh, K (2010). Emerging Education Technology. 100 Ways to Teach with Tiwtter. Retrieved July 12, 2012 from http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/02/100-ways-to-teach-with-twitter/

EmergingEdTech (2010). The growing use of Twitter by today’s eductors. Retrieved July 12, 2012 from http://youtu.be/GFP07a3ThAs