After experimenting with technologies like Papershow with Andy, I’m starting to think about how they address or do not address problems that arise when trying to incorporate e-learning into mathematics teaching at university.
I wonder if/how mathematicians could move away from the blackboard…
Introduction
Twitter is a micro-social networking utility designed to answer the question ‘What are you doing now?’. In practise, it’s used for a multitude of things, from news casts and marriage proposals to micro-blogging and cyber-wars. Given the diversity of uses Twitter ostensibly possesses, this paper first investigates how Twitter is currently being used at the University of Bath, before considering some case studies where it has been used as an e-learning tool.
What is Twitter and how does it work?4,5,6
Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part mobile phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question ‘What are you doing now?’. Users (let’s call them “tweeters”) have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the tweeter is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resources the user found interesting, musings, or questions. Similar to social networking websites like Facebook- which has itself evolve to include mini-updates- Twitter lets users create formal friendships, which collectively establish numerous and interconnected networks of users. In addition, Twitter works with mobile phones and other SMS clients, making it an easy way for mobile users to stay in touch virtually everywhere.
After creating an account, you can personalise your profile page and enter tweets into a text field. Unless you declare your tweets as protected, they appear on a “public timeline” page, which displays all public tweets in reverse chronological order, like a series of micro-blogs. Each tweet identifies the tweeter, whose screen name links to that person’s profile page, showing all of their precious tweets and their friends’ tweets. If you are registered and logged in, you can add them as a friend (“follow” them), see a list of their friends (“followers”), and add any of those people as your friends (i.e. begin to follow them). Once you are following at least one person, your Twitter home page shows the tweets posted by you and your friends, though you can still access the public timeline separately. You can also send private messages to friends, or post a direct reply to another tweet, by using the @ precursor. You can also tag your tweets by using the # precursor, allowing any tweeter to search for information via tweet tags.
All of the Twitter functions are also available through SMS. If you provide Twitter with a mobile phone number or IM contact in formation, you can follow individual users, even if you are not friends with them. By choosing to follow a user, you will be notified by phone, IM, or both any time that person posts a new tweet. Twitter integrates with blogs and other web pages, providing Flash and JavaScript code options that allow web pages to access Twitter updates. Twitter also provides RSS, which allows news aggregators to subscribe to individual feeds, which can be one tweeter’s post, your friends’ tweets, or the public timeline.
How is Twitter being used at the University of Bath?
The motivation behind answering this question is based around the successful use of Twitter in a variety of situations. In particular, the following Twitter accounts are specifically relevant to students at the University of Bath:
1) UniofBath: tweets from this account are in tandem with the News & Information section on the campus website home. Students following UniofBath can benefit by receiving news on Twitter and by SMS as soon as they are published.
2) BathSU: in April 2009, when the Summer Ball 2009 tickets went on sale, bathstudent.com experienced problems due to excessive traffic. Students following BathSU were kept updated about ticket sales and bathstudent.com service via Twitter.
3) CareersatBath: the Careers department publish an RSS feed of job opportunities via Twitter, particularly useful for students and graduates seeking employment.
4) bathcsc: though this page is not controlled by the University of Bath, students and staff were advised that it may be helpful to follow bathcsc, as they provide tweets regarding any delays in local bus services. This proved to be especially useful in February 2009, when a short period of unusual weather meant that snow on the roads severely affected public transport to campus.
7There is also an FAQ on Moodle guiding users how to put a Twitter RSS feed onto a course page.
Yet, despite the apparent use outside the classroom, the relative penetration of Twitter into e-learning remains unapparent.
The beauty of Twitter is revolves around its simplicity- tweeters are not given the opportunity or character space to clutter their accounts, which is indeed an irritating truth for other social networking websites. Consequently, given the demographics of tweeters, how might educators improve e-learning by tweeting at the University of Bath?
Some case studies
Twitter’s unique style of communication occupies a space between synchronous and asynchronous methods of electronic communication. The diagram below illustrates this:
Each interaction will be placed differently along the timeline, sometimes it will be more like instant messaging, whereas other conversations may be more like e-mail exchanges. The flexibility of the nature of Twitter means is a testimony to the different ways in which it may be used. Andy Ramsden and Lindsay Jordan suggest three different categories of uses in their 2009 Summer Seminar on Twitter13:
1. EC10160: Introduction to Economics- University of Bath
Sabah Abdullah from the Department of Economics and International Development was a tutor in the academic year 2008/09 for an introduction course to economics. Study in this unit requires a good understanding of current world affairs, so students are expected to read news around the subject. Abdullah created a Twitter account specifically for the course, called EC10160, then asked students to create their own accounts and follow EC10160. Tweets were regularly published with links to relevant pages. @replies and mentions were used to communicate with students, albeit sparingly.
A survey was sent out after the course finished, in an attempt to gage the success of Twitter as an e-learning tool in this instance. There were only eight responses, so quantitative data may only be analysed with marked trepidation. On the other hand, qualitative data from this survey gives us valuable insight into what students thought about this form of asynchronous communication.
We first note that six of the eight responders (75%) had never used Twitter before this course. Therefore, as a new technology, we may expect most students to be unsure in deciding whether Twitter was a useful way of getting information updated to them compared to Moodle. This was indeed true, with 62.5% reporting neutral stances when asked about this directly. In this sample’s opinion, it seems that the main downfall of this method of being updated was being lumbered with the obligation of checking Twitter for their course. “People who just use Twitter for Economics won’t open it very frequently”, claimed one student, in line with their colleague who sees Twitter as yet “’another’ application”- with e-mail, Facebook and Moodle, it became more like a chore.
Some students also felt that Twitter fell weak to Moodle, perhaps because they were “more used to using [it]” and that they could “get hold of [their] lecture notes, Powerpoints and assignments” from Moodle, whilst reading the news anyway. A quick way to partially address this may be to integrate Twitter into Moodle, using an RSS feed7.
Despite uncertainty in this context though, when asked whether they thought Twitter could be used to improve their learning, five out of the eight said “Yes”, and the remaining three said “Unsure”- an overall positive experience. A few mentioned it was “good for the news”, though some uncertainty existed with some suggestion that Twitter was limited to only news telling, and one comparing it to Moodle. Nonetheless, the general accord recognises Twitter as possibly a “good source of information”, with one student even suggesting it’s use as synchronous communication tool (see item 2 below; ‘The Twitter Experiment.’)
Twitter was certainly no detriment to the students’ learning, so despite some uncertainty, the evident nuggets of positive feedback make this a successful use of micro-blogging that is worth investigating further.
2. The Twitter Experiment- University of Texas at Dallas10
Dr. Monica Rankin, a Professor of History for the University of Texas at Dallas, was keen to investigate how social networking websites may be used to enhance learning, by moving away from plain lecturing. She, with the help of Kim Smith, introduced the use of Twitter into the course “U.S. History II”. U.S. History II is mandatory in the state of Texas, so the students of the class of 90 were from many different departments, and hence would be likely to have different academic strengths and weaknesses.
Two-thirds of the classes were given as lectures, whilst the remaining third was reserved for “The Twitter Experiment”. Students were required to complete some mandatory reading before an open-book quiz at the start of the class. The remaining time was used to discuss the reading and quiz on Twitter, using @replies.
There were two key points which made using Twitter possible in this instance: firstly, Rankin set up a Twitter account, ushistoryII, to follow all of the students and their comments. Students were also given #tags so they could follow the week’s discussions. Most imperatively, TweetDeck was used as a central hub to track discussions. 8TweetDeck is a desktop Twitter application. 9Like other Twitter applications, it interfaces with the Twitter applicable programming interface to allow users to send and receive tweets. Rankin and students used tweetdeck to split the different discussions into columns according to #tags. 11This allowed for easy tracking of all the discussions throughout the course, obviously useful for future reference.
The Tweetdeck interface was projected at the front of the class, and students were encouraged to communicate with each other synchronously.
Below, Rankin describes her best practices in using Twitter in the classroom as above, decided through trial and error:
“We experimented with a variety of different strategies for encouraging the most constructive discussions through twitter in the classroom. After some trial and error, I found that putting students into small groups (of 3 to 5) and allowing the group to discuss the material together stimulated more ideas. I also found that it was best to give them discussion topics so that most of the comments were based on a common them or at least related to the same reading. Depending on the topic, they would tweet for ten minutes or so and then I would suggest a change of topic. Students would have mini-discussions in their small groups and each student could tweet the most relevant comments being circulated in the group. They could respond to comments being posted by other students or suggest an interesting perspective on one of the readings. Many students also tweeted comments on how they might use the readings on the exams.
I eventually concluded that the “discussions” were more constructive if I circulated around the room and made myself available for comments, questions, and other direct feedback. By circulating around the room, I could respond directly to students and I could get suggestions from them of other topics they wanted to address. The teaching assistant sat at her computer and monitored the discussion unfolding on the screen. She would post comments and respond to questions. She was also responsible for notifying me if there were any comments that needed to be addressed by me right away or if we needed to change topics. This was an important aspect of our twitter experiment. With 90 students in one room, I needed the teaching assistant’s participation to make this format work. She was completely on board and energetic about trying new things and figuring out how to make twitter an effective classroom tool.
During the last 5 to 10 minutes of class, I would break up the groups and bring the 90 students back together again to “process” the discussion. During the processing time, the teaching assistant and I could emphasize some of the most useful comments that had been posted during class. Students could also respond to ideas they saw and/or ask questions for clarification. With our “best practices,” we found that twitter was most effective when it was combined with other discussion strategies (small group discussions, interaction with the instructor, and processing as an entire class.) Twitter did not replace more conventional discussion formats; instead it enhanced the discussions and brought more student interaction.
Since twitter is a public and open access internet technology, I made twitter participation optional for students. But I also needed to provide an option for students who chose not to set up a twitter account. There were also some students who either did not have the equipment (laptop computer) to use twitter in class or who did not have an unlimited texting plan on the cell phone. I encouraged those students to write down their comments on a paper during class and turn them in to the teaching assistant at the end of the class period. The teaching assistant would then post all of the written comments on twitter after class was over. In this way, all of the useful comments that students wrote on paper were still accessible to the rest of the class as a study aid. Eventually, most students set up a twitter account and used the technology to make their comments. Fewer than 15 hand-wrote comments on a regular basis.
The teaching assistant would go through all of the comments after class and send a direct response to any tweets that needed to be addressed—including questions that remained unanswered or exceptional comments that warranted direct feedback. Twitter also has a “favorites” feature that we used to mark our favorite tweets to indicate to students which ideas would be most helpful to them on the exams.”
Rankin reports that near the start of the course, some time needed to be spent getting students onto and understanding Twitter. This is consistent with Abdullah’s findings, with most of the students not having used Twitter before.
Student comments showed some strong approval for this use of Twitter. In particular, the transparency of student thoughts seemed to be something to revel in. Rankin deems the experiment as successful “primarily because it encouraged students to engage students who otherwise would not.” A student confirmed the advantages of this, saying to have 30 or 40 people tweeting to each other, rather than the usual 3 or 4, was very interesting. Twitter also gave this student the ability to re-tweet after the class, allowing students to “really think about the material” they’ve been learning.
Perhaps the reason for success on this level is that students are able to leave their normal comfort zones. One student describes how Twitter has eradicated any concern about speaking in front of the rest of the class- “it really helps to not have to worry about speaking to the whole class [out loud]”. This student is not alone, as many of his colleagues also describe their now unimportant worries of “needing to pipe up in front of the class of 90 students.”
“Nearly everyone participates in some way”, says Rankin, which is extremely beneficial for a history class in particular, where your colleagues’ opinions are of great importance and significance.
Despite success, it is important to remember that Twitter is somewhat limiting. With tweets needing to be less than 140 characters, the detail that students can go is limited. It is possible to post more than one tweet to portray an idea, though this may complicate the Tweetdeck and make it more difficult for the students or teacher to follow.
Conclusions and Discussion
April 2009 saw Twitter hit over 10 million users1. Market researchers give a modest estimate of 12 million users by the end of the calendar year2. This would suggest that we are indeed still slowly moving towards a “peak of hype enlightenment” 3. If we were following a Gartner Hype cycle, we’d expect to hit a “trough of disillusionment” soon after such a peak. Although this paper focuses on Twitter, it is very important to remember that tweeting is just a specific case of micro-blogging: should Twitter lose popularity, or even be removed from the internet completely, it would not be impossible (neither too difficult) to produce micro-blogging software to use in a similar manner. Indeed, if the potential was seen as great enough, this may be a desirable action to take in any case, using the opportunity to customise the software to address particular issues or needs that an individual teacher may have.
Tom Barrett summarises this effectively: 12“[Twitter] is one of many tools that we have at our disposal. I do not see it replacing any of the others we use, nor do I see the positive impact upon learning being exclusive to Twitter.”
Nonetheless, if the e-learning community are to proceed with using Twitter, the above limitations and potential evanescence should be considered. Most significantly, it must be remembered that micro-blogging is restricted to flow learning, rather than directed learning. The implications of this are clear: in order to be successful, participation would be essential. For the U.S. History II course, contribution to the tweet threads was a significant factor in choosing the participation mark awarded for students. Therefore, most people signed up to Twitter, and almost unanimous popularity was achieved. Accordingly, it’s not surprising that in the asynchronous example, we could attribute any disapproval of Twitter to the fact that students weren’t required to take part actively in order to gain marks. Reduced student participation could also be attributed to the fact that this use of Twitter was teacher-centred.
Abdullah recognises this, and recommends that given the social nature of Twitter, it may be worth using a personal account for e-learning, rather than a course account. The view is that students may rather follow a popular lecturer or professor than follow a sterile account, such as “EC10160”.
A further comment instigated by the nature of micro-blogging is the limitation of Twitter to flow learning rather than directed learning. Nonetheless, with appropriate instruction, we’ve seen two case studies where Twitter has been used in conjunction with traditional teaching styles to facilitate different and more effective learning. Today’s students are learning in the current peak of technological age, and so are inherently at picking up new technologies, and assimilating with different types of teaching. Therefore, I would strongly urge interested teachers to try using Twitter with their teaching, to investigate for themselves the potential benefits of micro-blogging in e-learning.
Appendix- some useful definitions
5@reply: An @reply is a public message sent from one person to another, distinguished from normal updates by the @username prefix. If a message begins with @username, we collect it as a reply. Reply publicly to any update on Twitter by using the @username format.
5Mention: A mention is any Twitter update that contains @username in the body of the tweet. They are included under the replies tab. If you include more than one person in your update and use the @username format, that person will also see the update in their replies tab.
#tag: Anyone can put a tag in their tweet by including the # prefix. Twitter is equipped with a search box that allows users to search for specific tags.
tweeter: A user of Twitter
Micro-blog: a short note or blog, usually of less than 200 characters and without a title. A tweet is an example of a micro-blog.
5Re-tweet: To “retweet” is to repeat/quote someone’s tweet.
Bibliography
1- Twitter Traffic surges to 10 million: The Demographics Driving the Growth. http://www.briansolis.com/2009/04/twitter-traffic-surges-to-10-million-the-demographics-driving-the-growth/
2- Beware the Twitter Flitterers. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007069
3- Ramsden, A., 2008. How and why are people using Twitter: A small group study. Discussion Paper. University of Bath.
4- 7 things you should know about Twitter. http://www.educause.edu/eli
5- Twitter Support. http://help.twitter.com/portal
6- About Twitter. http://twitter.com/about#about
7- How can I display a Twitter feed within a Moodle course? http://moodle.bath.ac.uk/faq/content/16/215/en/how-can-i-display-a-twitter-feed-within-a-moodle-course.html
8- TweetDeck on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TweetDeck
9- TweetDeck. http://tweetdeck.com/beta/
10- The Twitter Expriment. http://www.utdallas.edu/~mar046000/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm
11- How one teacher uses Twitter in the classroom. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_one_teacher_uses_twitter_in_the_classroom.php
12- Twitter- a teaching and learning tool | ICT in the classroom, Tom Barret, http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/29/twitter-a-teaching-and-learning-tool/
13- Twitter Summer Seminar Series- Andy Ramsden & Lindsay Jordan, 27th May 2009
Being a mathematician in e-learning, I was invited by Dan Sutton to join the Southwest regional hub of Sigma CETL. It was very interesting to attend the annual meeting and to hear about advancements in e-learning used to teach mathematics.
The most important things highlighted were the actual limitations of e-learning in mathematics currently. Mathematics is a subject rich with notation, characters, superscripts, subscripts, super-superscripts and even sub-subscripts which you would not usually encounter in any other situation. What makes it worse is that notation is often ambiguous without context, so most things take an explanation for students to understand. This poses obvious problems for students who find it more difficult to read or write than others. Notably, very few students with sever visual impairments can study mathematics- without a lecturer being able to point and wave their hands around, learning advanced mathematics is extremely difficult.
This highlights how we may reach barriers for e-learning in mathematics which must be broken down before e-learning is centralised in any educational institution- or run the risk of eliminating the most effective style of learning available.
Admittedly, it was very difficult to throw away any preconceptions I had about Moodle and to outright ask people questions to which I thought I knew their answers. Acknowledging the need for my opinions to be verified, I finally released the survey designed to see how students use Moodle and where they may struggle before the weekend.
So far, there have been 60 responses- not bad for only 2 days of light Facebook advertising- and it looks like the results are coming back as expected. All but one person ranked the usability of Moodle as at least ‘okay’, with the majority deeming it to be ‘good’ or indeed ‘very good.’ I haven’t pinpointed the reasoning for this- though I mainly suspect it’s largely to do with the impressive technological capacity of the average student, combined with the fact that most courses seem to only use Moodle lightly.
Furthermore, when the few who struggled with an aspect of Moodle were asked to elaborate or specify, they were no recurring themes, except for the fact, that they either had visited the FAQ area and established it as redundant, or had not even been at all.
My remit was to reproduce the How-To guides in the Moodle FAQ Area. …but I’m not sure how important this is anymore- perhaps it would be better to convert and truncate the guides to improve accessability- I’ll discuss this with Andy tomorrow.
The Twitter project is nearly a working paper on Opus, just a few updates to go now- speaking with Lindsay in the Mahara training session gave me some renewed faith in the possible uses of microblogging as a personalised learning tool/environment. She explained how by simply following people who tweet about things you could want to know, e-learning for example, you can easily build up a network for learning via microblogs. I will like to update the Twitter project with a new section accordingly.
Now I’m steadily denting the next few projects of the summer. Today, I prepared 2 surveys on the survey.bris.ac.uk:
1) Moodle help survey- to discover if/how people get/need help on Moodle
2) The LTEO Workshops Evaluation survey
Currently awaiting approval… …then will send them out, to return to them in about 3 weeks.
Also had a chat with Andy about Mahara- I’m not so keen on this becoming a social network- especially when so many people have their own personal websites- would be good for work submission though.
The other thing on the agenda for this week is converting the pdf Moodle how-to guides into html compatible format… and also re-wording them to assume a slightly more advanced and technologically able student… (for example, one of the guides starts by ‘assuming the reader has basic keyboard and mouse competency’. hmm.)
I’ve been working today on how to expand the research paper.
At first, it seems a bit harebrained to think about adding completely sections after I’ve already submitted a complete draught, but it would be a shame to omit any good ideas, especially with this area of research, which is new and exciting.
My thoughts are to possibly include a new section giving examples of how I think micro-blogging could be used as an e-Learning tool- given all the background idea I’ve done, surely I can think of a few things?! I’ll try not to be too capricious in describing them…
Some model examples of uses of micro-blogging
1. Asynchronous learning
This really echoes and extends what Sabah was looking into with EC10160 (Introduction to Economis) within the Department of Economics and International Development. Her idea and approach was very innovative, though there could have been improvements in the way it was used.
The general consensus I took from the survey results was one of uncertainty. Perhaps this could have been avoided if Sabbah had more confidence in Twitter as an e-Learning tool, despite being unsure of the outcome. By this, I mean specifically that not enough posts were generated: I looked up the course #tag, and only found about 19 posts from her for the duration of the course. Over what would be 5 months of studying, this doesn’t seem like enough- she was using Twitter to supposedly inform pupils of interesting news articles- surely she read more than this over that period? The updates were at regular intervals, but I’d imagine that any disilliusionment may be a result of just simple lack of use of Twitter.
Another thing I’ve deduced from Sabbah’s example is that enthusiasm is very important when trying to get students to get new things. If we face the fact that we can easily stereotype 18-25 year olds as ‘too cool to care’, even in the cases of extreme intelligence and talent, maybe we’d be able to address how to engage them properly. Some evidence for this are in the EC10160 tweets- at the start, they were mainly formal, but towards the end of the course, sometimes she’d greet the students in her tweets as well. Myself, I think the personalisation is probably of tangible significance in the enjoyment levels of the technology. Definitely a plus, since I do think most people learn more effectively when they enjoy the teaching and interact with the teacher well on a personal level.
There also were one or two accessibility qualms with students too stubborn to log into Twitter once a day to check for new course tweets. We need to find a way to somehow motivate such students, in some sense.
Suggestions:
1) Have a precise aim at the start of the course exactly what you want to use Twitter for.
2) Donate one session in a computer lab with students to sign them up to Twitter, and explain to them how it is used.
3) Promise to and do update the course status at more regular intervals, perhaps daily.
4) Make using the account mandatory in some sense- perhaps include Twitter examples in class discussion
5) Increase accessibility for students unwilling to try Twitter- an effective approach may be to synchronise an RSS feed in the Moodle course with Twitter. This way, students could subscribe to the RSS feed if they didn’t like Twitter, and receive news by e-mail.
6) As suggested by Sabah, personalise the experience by possibly allowing students to follow a well-liked lecturer rather than a sterile course name.
7) Think about using Twitter in more than one way so it’s more integrated into the course- perhaps it could be used to discuss what to cover in a revision session, or to clarify course information as well as using for news updates. This may be particularly beneficial for shy or standoffish students with simple questions they are too shy to ask the teacher directly about.
It’s important to keep experimenting- given that there was some positive feedback from students this time, I believe it’s worth trying to use Twitter again, and seeing if any of the suggested changes ameliorates feedback received from students.
2. Synchronous learning
Monica Rankin experienced great levels of success using micro-blogging for her course at UT Dallas. However, we must remember that she used it for a history class, and that this sort of use of Twitter is probably limited to certain subject and study areas. For example, it would probably be difficult to have live discussions about mathematics or chemistry on Twitter. Nonetheless, I’ll post consider Rankin’s experiment to write a brief summary of how a teacher might like to use Twitter in a synchronous way:
So… I just handed in my first draught for Andy to look through. After all the research about Twitter, I’ve been more and more surprised about how people can use this simple micro-blogging service creatively to improve e-learning.
Has to be said though, I’ve left the potential of Twitter in e-Learning as a Personal Reflective Log mostly unexplored… Traditionally, you might capture an initial idea on paper and transfer it into your work later. With Twitter, this could be more instant using your phone or computer, but given how personal this type of learning is, permeating it with justifiable reason proves to be immediately difficult.
A call for more research… hopefully to find something before Friday…
I spent most of last week trawling resources, trying to find out as much about Twitter as I possible could. This led me to writing a very precise and detailed description of Twitter- probably more details than required for the average user- but this is okay, since someone using Twitter for e-learning purposes is probably not the average user. Another important reason for the gross amount of detail lies within the demographics of Twitter: there’s a lot of hype going on about Twitter as a social network… 1380% increase in members… booming faster than Facebook… but what most reports tend to omit is that over two thirds of Tweeters give up within a month, and about three quarters only ever making one post. So even if you’ve heard about Twitter, there seems to be a great chance you don’t know how to use it properly on a personal level, let alone as a learning tool.
Despite tireless, intricate searches, the examples of uses of Twitter in higher education seem to be limited. It would seem that most people view it ephemerally, and are too scared to try it out for themselves, so instead just write blogs about why it would ‘never work.’ It’s important to take big leaps though- this shows, because where people have been brave enough to try using Twitter, the outcome has been positive. Besides, even if Twitter is a short-lived tool, microblogging 140 characters is not difficult to replicate at all.
I’ve now looked into two big case studies- one with UT Dallas, Texas, the other right at home in Bath, in the Department of Economics and International Development. Since my time working at the LTEO is limited, I can’t spend too long on this paper (for need of starting other projects), which means I don’t really have the time to scrutinize them as much as they can be. It may be beneficial at some point to extend my work by asking for more feedback from Monica Rankin (UT at Dallas) or Sabah Abdullah (University of Bath.)
It’s my second day at work! This morning, I met with Andy Ramsden and we discussed emerging technologies at the university. The first part of my job is going to involve supporting such technologies.
I’m going to concentrate on Twitter, and answer the following questions in a short report:
1) What is Twitter?
2) How might it be used to enhance teaching and learning?
3) How is it being used at the University of Bath?
I have a Twitter account and can describe how people are using it with their friends. The trickier part of my report will be to describe how it might be used to enhance pedagogy at the University of Bath- with only 140 characters allowed per Tweet, it is not possible to post reams of information on Twitter- the concentration will need to be on using Twitter to ‘direct’ students as appropriate.