1. How has been
used teaching and learning
Presentation at EDEN Annual Conference
Valencia, 9-12 June, 2010
Stephen Jenner, British Council India

2. Focus of research
Technology-enhanced learning:
practices and debates
UK Open University MAODE programme, 2009
1. How is Twitter being used in education?
2. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
3. What additional areas of research are needed?

3. How do you use Twitter?
Social networking
Finding resources
Teaching/training
Learning
Collecting followers
Public diary
Other

5. Twitter – a community of
practitioners?
Heil & Piskorski, Harvard Business Review (2009)
Social networks 10% produce 30% of content
Wikipedia 15% produce 90% of content
Twitter 10% produce 90% of content

6. How has Twitter has been used for
teaching/learning?
Dr Monika Rankin, Professor of History
University of Texas at Dallas
‘The Twitter Experiment’ (2009)

8. Student comments on the
‘Twitter Experiment’
Now I can join a discussion of 30-40 other students on a
topic instead of just 3 or 4.
A class of 90 can be intimidating… now all I have to do
is type and hit enter and your opinion’s out there for
everyone to read.
For us to put intelligent discussion out there on the
internet is pretty cool.
You can go back and review the discussions each
week, which is a pretty useful study tool.
(The 140 character limit) helps us to focus our
discussion.

9. Other uses of Twitter,
or ‘Twitter behaivours’
Kerawalla, Minocha, Kirkup, Conole (2008) found 5
‘blogging behaivours’ among students
Resource building – H800, MAODE, 2009
Network building – Portsmouth Uni (Minocha, 2009)
Broadcasting – IATEFL (Ballantyne, 2009)

10. Strengths and weaknesses
of Twitter
Tweet length – re-defines synchronous vs asynchronous
communication (next slide)
Online identity – content collapse (Wesch, 2008) vs the
web 2.0 broadcaster
Privacy – control of followers but not status updates
Mobile learning – anytime/anywhere learning
Content – up to 40% tweets ‘pointless babble’
(Pearanalytics, 2009) but you can switch who you follow
on and off
Personalisation –personal vs institutional communities

12. Further areas for research
Use of Twitter to build professional COPs
Twitter ‘behaivours’
Twitter online ‘identity’