Why Twitter Matters: Twitter Uses for Professors

Camille Rutherford explores how Twitter can change the classroom —and academic practice.

by  Camille Rutherford

In the past year the popularity of the micro-blogging/social network site Twitter has exploded as the media grabbed hold of this once relatively obscure site and launched it into the stratosphere by anointing it as the place to be for techies, politicians, news junkies, and Hollywood stars.

Created in 2006, the site was dwarfed by the already established social network sites Facebook, MySpace, and Linked In, which already had a popular following amongst the college crowd. As a blogging tool, it also had to compete with more notable blogging sites such as TypePad, Blogger, and Live Journal.

Unlike traditional blogging sites, Twitter requires users to limit their messages to a maximum of 140 characters. On the surface, this might seem unappealing to either verbose authors or academics in general, but less than laconic writers can include links to lengthier treatises if they combine Twitter with URL shortening services such as TinyURL or bit.ly,.

Twitter in the Classroom

The popularity of Twitter among Hollywood celebrities might have dissuaded most academics from exploring the Twitterverse, but as Twitter’s popularity grew, reports of university and college professors using it to enhance their teaching practice began to appear. By the end of the 2008-2009 academic year, there was a growing body of examples of how academics were using Twitter to support teaching and learning at the university and college level.

The anecdotal evidence revealed that professors were using Twitter as a novel way to engage students in large lecture halls. While some professors have used it to extend discussions after class, others have used Twitter to support real time discussions that complemented their lectures. Instead of raising their hand or interrupting the lecture by calling out questions, students could post their questions or comments to the Twitter feed for the class. With a quick glance the instructor could view the questions and provide a response during the lecture. Twitter also provided a unique way for students to get to know their instructors — and their academic fields — by allowing students to follow a professor’s Twitter posts or “tweets” about her or his research and reading interests. (Explore the links below for specific examples.)

• 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom

• A Professor’s Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

• Twitter for Academia

While many of these Twitter uses are interesting and may be novel within the higher education context, they are not very innovative. Supporting in-class and after-class discussions, providing instant feedback to students, and fostering a sense of classroom community simply replicates the features of most course management systems (CMS). The one advantage Twitter has is that most CMS programs (i.e. Blackboard, Sakai or WebCT,) operate as walled communities and prevent the contributions of those outside the university or college community. In contrast, Twitter is essentially a transparent tool that allows these previously private interactions to take place in a public forum. The public nature of Twitter allows professors to recommend that students “follow” individuals or companies who work in a sector related to course content and for knowledgeable outsiders to contribute to class discussions. Using Twitter to facilitate connections to those outside the confines of the classroom increases the authenticity of the learning experience and represents one of the few truly innovative and possibly disruptive uses of Twitter in the classroom.

The term “disruptive innovation,” coined by Harvard University professor Clayton Christenseni, describes innovations that have the potential to disrupt or alter significantly established practices. Using Twitter to replicate or even improve an existing function that was previously fulfilled by the established CMS programs represents a “sustaining innovation, ”(to further co-opt Christensen’s terminology). A sustaining innovation is simply a new way of fulfilling an old function. In contrast, providing students with a means to interact frequently with professionals and companies outside the university community —something that was not possible in the closed CMS environment — may be a new way of performing a new function. Thus, Twitter may disrupt classroom learning by inviting the outside community into the ivory tower.

Twitter’s real potential as an innovative tool for higher education, however, may not be related to classroom practice at all. While classroom use of Twitter has so far dominated campus discussions, little has been said about using Twitter as a means of professional development for academics. In exploring this possibility, you finally begin to push the technological envelope, as such novel uses have the potential to be disruptive innovations.

Twitter Disrupts Professor Professional Development.

A prime way for professors to engage in professional development is to attend academic conferences. Each year a large portion of an individual faculty member’s professional development (PD) funds may be spent on travel to conferences. Unfortunately, limited PD funds can greatly curtail your travel schedule.

Following tweets posted by academics who are attending academic conferences may allow those with smaller PD travel accounts to follow along from afar. This may appear to be a new way of performing an old function, as it isn’t unusual for conference sessions to be recorded and made available for those unable to attend. There might have even been simulcasts, whereby participants at various locations could observe in real time. But with Twitter, participants can follow the Twitter feeds as well as post their comments and questions all in real time. Twitter users in the room can share comments or questions with the presenter, allowing homebound participants to interact with the presenter and the on-site audience in a new way.

Even when academics have managed to cobble together the funds to attend these highly enriching sessions, there are often not enough hours in the day to attend all the sessions you would like. Consequently, Twitter can become a useful conference planning resource. In the days leading up to a conference a Twitter search can be performed to find others who are planning to attend the same conference and, more important, to find out how the conference tweets will be identified. The annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Science, held in Ottawa last spring, was identified by the tag “#congress09”. By including this tag in their posts, conference attendees could quickly search for others tweets that were related to the conference. In the days prior to a conference it is not uncommon for conference presenters to post an early preview of their presentation, to jump start the discussion and encourage others to attend their session.

At large conferences, tags for sub-conferences and Special Interest Groups (SIG) are often created, making it easier for academics with very specific research interests to find other like-minded researchers. Some conference attendees have even started organizing “Tweet-ups” which are opportunities to meet-up with Twitter users or “Tweeps” who are attending the conference in person. These Tweet-ups enable professors to transform their distant, virtual connections into a viable professional network.

Using Twitter to Extend your Professional Network

Like blogging, Twitter has become a means to share ideas, collaborate, pose questions, and invite interaction and feedback. While this was possible in the past, it would require you to jump from blog to blog using a variety of interfaces and interaction tools. With Twitter all of this information comes directly to your Twitter feed, making it easier to review and comment on these posts from one place.

Depending on your discipline and the size of your campus community, the ability to interact with others on campus who have similar research interests may be limited. Using tools like Twitter search allows academics to sift through the Twitterverse looking for posts and discussions related to their research interests. Because these exchanges take place in a public venue, you can choose to join the discussion by posting your own tweets or simply follow along. Twitter resources like We Follow, a directory of Twitter users that can be searched by areas of interest, makes it even easier to find like-minded academics or informed practitioners for you to interact with.

Once you have found others with similar research interests to follow and have some followers of your own, your Twitter network may develop into an effective and efficient idea incubator. Twitter can then be used to solicit information and invite interaction from the broader academic community and practitioners alike. Interacting within this diverse community may enable researchers to break out of their academic silo and forge interdisciplinary connections that may support the development of new and unique approaches. Below is a brief interaction that took place among three university professors from three different disciplines, from three distant locations.

Adding to the benefit of using Twitter to develop your profession network is an emergent category of Twitter tools that allow users to graph their Twitter network. The Twitter Social Collider is a data visualization tool that reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter that can be tracked by username or topic across timeii. Tools like Twitter Friends and Twitter Friend Wheel allow you to see how your Twitter followers are connected. These Twitter visualization tools may allow academics to see previously unknown relationships between Twitter users and find a friend of a friend that may have similar interests.

Using Twitter to Document Scholarly Impact

The introduction of online journals and digital distribution has begun to disrupt research disseminationiii. Similarly, Twitter has the potential to disrupt how the academic community assesses scholarly impact. Traditionally, scholarly impact was determined by examining where an academic had her or his work published. The ranking of peer-reviewed journals is based on a number of factors, including the frequency of citation a journal may receive or the selectiveness of the acceptance process. The end result is that the rank, tier, or Journal Impact Factor of a specific publication speaks to the quality of the work and the importance of the research it publishes. Consequently, journal ranking plays a great role in determining academic authority and prestige, which in turn greatly influence the tenure and promotion process for most academicsiv. Recently, newer methods have been proposed to assess scholarly impact and quantify reputation. The h-index, created by academic Jorge Hirsch, focuses on the frequency of citation, not on the location of the publicationv. This focus on frequency means Twitter can be used to demonstrate impact. Professors can use Twitter to disseminate their latest work by including a link to their paper. By adding a URL tracking service, such as bit.ly, Twitter users can also track how often the paper was downloaded, the date and time of the download, and even the country where the download occurred.

Even if a tweet does not include a link to a specific paper, the impact of the statements you make on Twitter can also be determined. When Twitter users like a tweet they have read, they can share that particular tweet with their Twitter followers by simply “retweeting” the original tweet. This creates a form of citation called “@ mentions”. Each retweet is automatically amended with the @ symbol and the Twitter name of the original author. Thus, all of the tweets referring to the user can be accessed from the user’s Twitter homepage or by performing a Twitter search. This may serve as an innovative way to demonstrate an academic’s role in knowledge development and dissemination.

Assessing a professor’s journal impact factor may demonstrate her or his research productivity but may not fully capture her or his contribution to the academic community. Engaging in discussions that serve to generate new ideas, forge interdisciplinary connections, and test emerging hypothesis are important ways to enhance understanding and disseminate information. If you consider knowledge dissemination to be a key factor in determining impact, Twitter may be a unique way to capture these contributions. Consequently, there may be a day when academics cite their number of Twitter followers, retweets, or @ mentions as part of the promotion and tenure application.

Camille Rutherford is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario.