Twitter

Draft

Definition

“Is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via SMS, instant messaging or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.” (Ramsden, 2008/Wikipedia).

In education

Daniel K. Schneider thinks that twitter replicates very much what people do with SMSs and instant messaging. Therefore one could use this technology to implement mobile learning/ubiquitous learning type of things, e.g.:

• data gathering scenarios (learners send data about something they observe to a central place)
• ideas gathering (including back channels for classroom and lecture hall teaching.

Furthermore, this kind of microblogging

• what is hot/going on in large multi-session conferences
• to rely important last minute informations / reminders to students

Since messages are very short, they also can be sent from a cell phone.

Links

• Twitter.com
• Twitter (Wikipedia)

Examples

• Edmedia08 Twitter
• Edmedia08 Twitter Memes

Bibliography

• Ramsden, Andy (2008). How and why are people using Twitter: A small group study. Technical report, University of Bath, Abstract_/PDF

• Wolfgang Reinhardt, Matthias Moi, Nina Heinze (2011) Analysis of Twitter usage in an exploratory seminar setting. Form@re 74. http://formare.erickson.it/wordpress/...