Using Twitter in Academic Teaching

Twitter
Using

in Academic Teaching
#yorksocmed

Ned Potter
Academic Liaison

Please go to http://twtpoll.com/yorksocmed
and fill out my one-question survey

Plan for today: explore why
Twitter might be useful in the
academic environment, set up
Twitter profiles (if you don’t
already have them) and discuss
the differences between using
Twitter for teaching and for
research.

Twitter is a social network which
allows users to exchange public
messages of 140 characters or less,
known as Tweets.
It’s easy to tweet, via:

Tweets can be entirely text-based or they can
contain multimedia such as images or video,
and links to anything online.

It works like this:
Your tweets are seen by other Twitter
users who follow you; you see the
tweets of users you follow. You can
quickly build up a network of peers
with shared interests. There are around
half a billion Twitter users worldwide.

1: YOU CAN’T SAY
ANYTHING IN 140
CHARACTERS.
Yes you can, because Twitter is meant to
be a conversation rather than a
broadcast. It’s easy to ask, and answer,
questions in 140 characters or less.

2: IT’S JUST PEOPLE
SAYING WHAT THEY
HAD FOR LUNCH.
No it isn’t – only celebrities really do
that, because they have so many
followers that meaningful dialogue isn’t
really possible.
For the rest of us, it’s a conversation.

3: IT’S GREAT FOR RESEARCH
AND BUILDING REPUTATION,
BUT IT CAN’T BE USED FOR
LEARING AND TEACHING..
Twitter is certainly more complicated
when it comes to teaching, but the
obstacles are not insurmountable and it
can be extremely beneficial.

Why
use Twitter?

non-teaching-reasons

Connect with your peers
Twitter is a brilliant networking tool – for
finding researchers with similar interests, for
keeping in touch after conferences , for finding
and engaging the leaders in your field.

If you follow the right people on
Twitter you’ll always know when
the latest papers are published,
when calls for papers announced,
when conferences are happening,
when developments in your field
are occurring, when new
technology emerges which is
relevant to what you do, and
what’s going on in HE.

Keeping up to date
On Twitter, the information comes
to you.

Twitter is a great way to tell
people about your research
outputs, your current projects, and
your professional activities.

Share what you’re doing
with the world
It can also be a brilliant funnel for
all your other social media
activities too – nothing is more
likely to get people reading your
blog (etc) than people tweeting
about it.

(Highly tweeted articles are 11
times more likely to be cited than
less-tweeted articles)
Eyesenbach, 2011, Can tweets predict citations?
Journal of Medical Internet Research 13 (4)
Hat-tip to Michelle Dalton – see
http://t.co/6MV8xQEujV for more stats.

Click the pic for some more

academic perspectives

on the non-teaching aspects

Find Tweeters by discipline:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/02/academic-tweeters-your-suggestions-in-full/

Departmental tweeters:
@uniofyork is the main account of the University
@UoYLibrary is the Library’s account
@UoYITServices is the IT services account
@RDT_York is the Researcher Development Team account
@TFTV_YORK is the TFTV account, one of the many Departments
on Twitter
@UoYEvents is the account for Events at York
@UoY_Yorkshare is the VLE team’s account

Wider HE tweeters:
@timeshighered is the Times Higher’s very active account
@lseimpactblog is the LSE Impact Blog’s account (don’t be put
off by the name, it’s relevant to all academics interested in Web
2.0 tools)
@gdnhighered is the Guardian’s Higher Education account

Tweet: your tweet is your message. 140
characters. Seen by a: your followers who
happen to be online at the time and b: anyone
who happens to look at your profile, and
potentially c: by the followers of anyone who
ReTweets it.

ReTweet: if you RT someone else’s tweet, it will
appear in your timeline and your followers can
see it. Being ReTweeted yourself is a really good
thing – it means your ideas are being exposed to
new networks.

@reply: you can converse directly with someone
by putting their username (beginning with @)
into your tweet – this will ensure the tweet
shows up in their ‘@ replies’.
Your tweets will be seen by anyone following
both you AND the person with whom you’re
conversing. (In other words, you don’t see every
tweet from every person you follow – Twitter
filters out the noise.)

Hashtag: a #hashtag is a way to bring together
disparate users on the same topic, without the
tweets needing to know each other already.
Hashtags can also be a way to archive conversations
on a theme, and discuss events or conferences.
You can click on any #hashtag (for example
#altmetrics) and find all recent tweets which have
included it. This is the best way to tweet around a
specific module (or academic topic).
Direct Message: a DM is a private message, within
the network, which only you and the recipient see.

Time to get started.
Go to Twitter.com and follow the
instructions EXCERCISE 1 in the
hand-out, Getting to know Twitter.

(10—15
minutes)
The handout is also available digitally at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/203096554/Using-Twitter-in-Academic-Teaching

4 ways
to use
Twitter for
teaching

1) Support the module
Using a hashtag for the module
(e.g. ##CHE2C32) provide further
reading suggestions, interesting
links to related content,
additional assignments for keen
students, reminders about
deadlines, clarifications and
answers to questions, third-party
opinions and stories.

2) Enhance the lecture / labsession / clinic
The backchannel… Allows students to ask
questions, emboldens them, allows them
to share with each other. You can (twt)poll
them during the session.
High risk, high reward.

Unlike other places we encourage
students to interact (message boards
in BlackBoard for example), with
Twitter many students are there
anyway. This means participation is
slightly more likely to take off.

3) Keep in touch
Excellent for postgrads who aren’t on
campus – but also for all students, to
have regular interaction outside the
scheduled lectures and seminars.

4) Synchronous and
asynchronous communication
Twitter allows you to post key information
to found later – as does BlackBoard – but
can also talk in real time and answer
queries on the fly.

Gary Wood at Sheffield has asked that students
direct all questions to him via Twitter (unless
sensitive) and it has significantly reduced his
time spent responding to enquries.
Replies are necessarily short and lacking in
formality, and are public so can be linked to
rather than rewritten (and may also reduce
duplicate queries).

Tweetbeam.com
Allows you to visualise tweets on a topic, in
real-time, on big screens in the lab/seminar/lecture

Go to

www.tweetbeam.com,

and type in the hashtag
for this session #yorksocmed

But surely we can’t MAKE the students
sign up for Twitter?

We cannot enforce UG
participation of any social
media platform – and all
the same information
must be also provided for
students who chose not
to participate in the
Twitter aspect of the
module.
So what’s the answer..?

Exercise 3.
Embed the #YorkSocMed stream
(or anything else you fancy) into a
BlackBoard module – follow the
instructions on the handout.

(20 minutes)

Archaeology academic at York.
Uses Twitter in teaching with
Yr3 and Postgrad students (as
well as for research and other
purposes).

Year 3 students created blogs as part of
summative assessments, and used Twitter in
conjuction with this.
“In combination with running these blogs, more than half of
the students either set up their own project-specific Twitter
feeds, or tweeted about their projects through their personal
accounts. They used Twitter completely of their own volition – I
didn't require it; indeed, I'm not sure how much I encouraged it
at all – but from reading their final reflections on their projects,
my impression is that everyone thought it was meaningful:
primarily for raising the visibility of their blogs, but also for
connecting them with new audiences and contributors to their
blog content.”

Using it with Masters students has seem results
vary according to the character of the cohort.
“I've used the #yorkchm2 hashtag informally with my

Master's level students since 2012. While previous cohorts
have used it to share resources and connect with
professionals in the field, my current cohort is not active at
all. The best result was with my 2013 cohort, where one of
my students initiated a now well-established and
international debate, using #freearchaeology, about the
exploitation of archaeology/heritage specialists.”
Read more in Sara’s FORUM article:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/192487795/Learning-TeachingForum-Spring-2014

More on the horizon.
“Starting in two weeks, I am launching a new

Master's level module where I am requiring
students to join and use Twitter, identifying
their module-specific tweets with the hashtag
#yorkunimuseums. I mention this as your
workshop participants can literally, then,
follow along to monitor the uptake and use of
the hashtag – they can basically be
adjudicators of its success!”

Here's a blurb from the module description to
explain my rationale for necessitating Twitter use:
We will also explore the potential of Twitter for
sharing and debating museums issues. There is a
massive and productive museums community
tweeting about current, pressing museological
topics from around the world. It’s important that
you become familiar with this community and learn
how to filter and assess the information that it is
circulating. Before class, instructions will be shared
with you on joining Twitter, and from there we will
tweet using the hashtag #yorkunimuseums.

Generally speaking there are
three kinds of Twitter tips for HE
1

Twitter in general

2

Twitter for teaching

3

Twitter for research
Numbers 2 and 3 are, by and large,
the exact opposite of each other…

Twitter in general
Above all, remember it’s not
about broadcasting, it’s
about conversation!

Consider the 1 in 4 rule*

Tweets directly
about your work

Consider the 1 in 4 rule*
A ReTweet?
A reply?

Tweets directly
about your work

A link to something useful?

*actually it’s more of a guideline…

research
4 out of 4 should relate to the module
A ReTweet?
A reminder?

Additional
assignment
or reading?

A link to something
relevant in the news?

Try not to think of it as
purely personal or purely
professional – it works
better when it’s both.


Try not to think of it as
purely personal or purely
professional – it works
better when it’s both.
(For this reason I’d recommend one
account only. All work accounts get no
followers; all play accounts have no value)


Teaching accounts should be
purely professional.
(For this reason I would recommend a separate
account, perhaps even one per module.)

research

Embrace the smartphone!
(Soon there will only BE smartphones
so you may as well get started now.)

Twitter in general

Embrace the smartphone!
(Soon there will only BE smartphones
so you may as well get started now.)
Tweet from conferences
(including pictures), converse on
the train, reply in the
supermarket queue.
Twitter doesn’t have to be
something you MAKE TIME for.

Twitter in general

Look for third-party content that
related to the module’s subject
matter, for example news reports
and media analysis, other
academic output, non-scholarly
writing on the same subject, etc.

research

Don’t just make statements,
ask questions.

Twitter in general

Twitter in general
You need to actually tell people
you’re there.

Twitter in general
You need to actually tell people
you’re there.
@username on your
business cards
on your PowerPoint
presentations
on your name-badge at
conferences
in your email signature

Any questions,
comments, ideas,
plans?

Thanks for coming!
Feel free to get in touch with follow
up questions: ned.potter@york.ac.uk
Library support for Researchers at
http://bit.ly/networkedresearch

These slides will be online at:
http://slideshare.net/UniofYorkLibrary

Absolutely every picture via www.iconfinder.com

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching

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