EDUCAUSE 2009 -- Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence

Tweeting

the Night Away

Joni Dunlap | joni.dunlap@ucdenver.edu | Twitter: @jonidunlapPatrick Lowenthal | patrick.lowenthal@ucdenver.edu | Twitter: @plowenthal

Log in Access shell

Locate forum

Post message

Wait for response

The Problem

Post/Respon

d

Post/Respon

d

Post/Respon

d

Post/Respon

d

What are you doing?What are you doing?

Rules of engagement

• 140 characters = tweet

• Following vs. followers

• Public vs. individual

• Public vs. private

• “#6710” “#obama” “#photography”

Twitter in ActionUse Presentation Mode to view, Click this header to give mouse control back to PowerPoint, change slide,

etc.

© SAP 2009 / Page 9

A student has a question about the chapter on multimodal learning. She immediately tweets her question to the Twitter community, and gets three responses within ten minutes—two responses from classmates, and one from her professor.

This leads to several subsequent posts, including comments from two practicing professionals.

A student working on an assignment is wondering about embedding music into a presentation. He tweets a question and gets a response from his professor and a practicing professional. Both point the student to different resources that explain how to embed music and provide examples to deconstruct. Within a half hour, the student has embedded music in his presentation.

A student finds a great video about storyboarding on YouTube and posts the URL to Twitter.

Her find is retweeted three times because others also think the video is great and worth sharing.

A student tweets that he just posted a new entry to his blog on how vision trumps all other senses during instruction and provides the URL.

His classmates, as well as other practicing professionals, read his blog post. He receives three tweets thanking him for sharing his ideas.

As part of a research project on legacy systems, a student poses a question to the Twitter community regarding the prevalent need for COBOL programmers. She receives responses from several IT professionals, some with links to helpful resources and contacts that can help her with research.

A student tweets that she is tired and going off to bed. She receives two tweets back from classmates wishing her a good night.

Other instructional benefits

• Addressing student issues in a timely manner

• Writing concisely

• Writing for an audience

• Connecting with community of practice

• Supporting informal learning

• Maintaining on-going relationships

Guidelines for instructional use

• Establish relevance for students

• Define clear expectations for participation

• Model effective Twitter use

• Recommend people to follow

• Build Twitter-derived results into assessments

• Continue to actively participate in Twitter

“Twitter has been a great way for me to check in with everyone who is using it. I found out how other’s were feeling about school, how life was treating them, how their jobs and families were doing. This is something much more intimate than mandatory weekly discussions...”

Follow us on Twitter

Joni Dunlap | Twitter: @jonidunlap

Patrick Lowenthal | Twitter: @plowenthal

Paper Available http://tinyurl.com/OurTwitterPaper

Presentation Available http://www.slideshare.net/plowenthal