Twitter and student engagement

                                               Image retrieved from http://teacherstraining.com.au/twitter-for-education/

Social media has attracted the interest in most of the sectors ranging from business to education. According to Hughes (2009), it motivates students to be more active learners. It is no doubt that it makes people more social and current; yet I am a bit suspicious about believing that it makes people active learner. Integrating various social tools into teaching and learning has become trendy after the social networking sites have sold the idea of getting connected with the others wherever they are.  Most of the college students use social networking to keep updated or present themselves virtually. Twitter is one of the primary microblogging platforms that people follow what is going on in 140 characters. It provides constant engagement in what is going on in the world. I have a twitter account and every time I log in, I lose the sense of rigid structure of information receiving. Every minute there appears more tweets to replace the others. I have read the article The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades by Junco, Heibergert and Loken (2011). When reading the literature review, I am convinced that twitter provides 1) student/faculty contact, 2) student cooperation 3) prompt feedback. Other principles listed under the good practice of twitter are active learning, and emphasizing time on task are flawed for me. As a language teacher, I would like to see a concrete example to believe in claims that it increases active learning. What is there for us to regard the twitter engagement as learning outcome by active participation? How can it emphasize time on task when the flows are constant and when you miss being updated and you feel behind the flow of time? The study mainly aims to examine what effects encouraging the use of Twitter for educational purposes have on students' engagement and semester grades. Honestly speaking, I am still not sure what it means by student engagement. Student engagement in what? Student engagement in construction of learning, or learning processes or social being? They are all relative and might directly or indirectly affect Twitter users (students). Designing a semester-course and working with experimental and control groups to keep updated for class discussion, reminders, assistance and study groups, the authors have concluded that the experimental group has a significant increase in engagement in learning process than the control group. The main limitation is that the scope is too narrow and is not operationalized. The other limitation is to measure the engagement. The study measured the engagement through self-report, not through student active engagement. The real life observations are left out. Last but not least, there might be other variations to cause an increase in student engagement.

References:

Hughes, A. (2009) Higher education in a Web 2.0 world. JISC Report. Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/ documents/publications/heweb20rptv1.pdf 

Junco, R., Heiberger, G., & Loken, E. (2011). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(2), 119-132