Modeling #Twitter Use: Do Students Notice?

Dr. Vanessa Dennen, Fabrizio Fornara

Florida State University

June 18, 2013

University of Wisconsin – Madison

Why Twitter?

Potential to support collaborative interactions and to foster both community building and knowledge sharing (Ebner et al., 2010; Junco, Heibergert & Loken, 2011; Lee & McLoughlin, 2010; Schroeder, Minocha & Schneider, 2010).

Direct experience building and interacting with a professional learning network.

We focused on the dynamics of students’ activity on Twitter in an educational setting and on the factors that influence this activity.

Purpose: To observe whether the Twitter activity of preservice teachers differs in the presence of an instructor model.

Hypothesis: An ongoing instructor presence that model appropriate tweets might encourage desired knowledge sharing and community building via Twitter within and across class sections.

The Study

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Activity

Activity: Semester-long Twitter assignment. Students were required to regularly post entries on Twitter. The content of posts was not constrained.

Group Class Sections

Follow Classmate

s

Use commo

n hashtag

Follow instructor model

Control 3 X X

Experiment

3 X X X

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Methods

Participants: six sections of approximately twenty students each, three sections per condition (N=117).

Data collection: Students’ tweets, surveys.

Data analysis: Coding categories were emergent in three main categories: Course related School related Non-school related

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Findings: Features

Similar number of tweets and use of hashtags

Overall, few tweets with a link. Students were not heavily interested in sharing resources.

Control group: used the reply feature more, communicated more with peers.

Experiment group: more likely to retweet, especially the instructor’s entries.

Experiment group: More likely to indicate Twitter a valuable tool for interacting with others (survey)

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Findings: Content

Most of the tweets are comments about assignments.

Most of the tweets were composed the day before class or during class.

The predominant attitude toward the class and homework was neutral, with a tendency to negative comments for the control

group.

The experiment group tweeted more about educational technology than control group.

The content of the tweets suggests that students were aware of the presence or absence of an instructor.

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Discussion

The presence of a co-tweeting instructor influences how students use Twitter, in terms of both the content of tweets and students’ likelihood to use certain features.

One unintended effect was the student’s orientation toward the instructor in the experiment condition.

In the absence of an active instructor students more freely shared their thoughts about the class.

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Recommendations

Establish desired outcomes and actively and consistently model the types of tweets and interactions that lead to those outcomes.

An ongoing, dynamic model provides students with a continuous reminder of how to complete the activity.

Adjust the instructor model to include interactions that should explicitly connect two or more students.

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Discussion Questions

Can we further shape students’ behavior on Twitter to foster both community building and knowledge sharing? How?

We want preservice teachers to build and interact with a professional learning network. What further steps can we take toward this direction? How far can we go?

Thanks!

Dr. Vanessa Dennen: vdennen@fsu.edu, @vdennen

Fabrizio Fornara: ff11@my.fsu.edu, @ffornara

June 18, 2013

University of Wisconsin – Madison

Codes + tweets

Content analysis codes with example of tweets

Features use

Summary of hashtag and feature use by students (S) and instructor/researcher (I/R)

Tweets content

Content analysis codes and corresponding number and percentage of tweets posted by students of both conditions.