Building a Learning Community with Twitter

by Kyle Chapman


I have been a Twitter (https://www.twitter.com) member since October of 2011. With occasional breaks, most of the time I have used it to engage in communities related to my profession and my hobbies. In terms of professional learning and community-building, I've enjoyed following several #edtech personalities such as Phil Hill (@PhilOnEdTech), Robin Kay (@kayuoit) and Jennifer Gonzalez (@cultofpedagogy). I also follow several programmers and programming-related groups as that's the field I teach in.

Upon learning in 2014 that it was easy to embed a Twitter widget into the homepage of a D2L Brightspace course (D2L Corporation, 2019), I adopted this very early in my post-secondary teaching career. If you use Brightspace or another LMS that supports this sort of embedding, it's a really good way to add interactivity and another form of broadcast communication to your course. Here, I'll discuss my experience with building community using Twitter in my courses and the benefits it brings.

Course Hashtags

In several of my courses, I have established course hashtags. Although a hashtag search can no longer be embedded in an LMS easily (more on this later), having a searchable record of course-related content is certainly an asset. Communicating the course hashtag also invites your students (i.e. your learning community) to participate, and centralizes your ability to view the community's messages and communicate with it.

Personally, I've used several of them to varying extents across most of the courses I have taught, including #VISB6201, #PROG1205, #NETD3202, #FWKI6203, #CAPR6203 and a few others.

When I have used a course hashtag, my use of it has fallen into one of four broad categories. First, in some cases, my tweets using a course hashtag were strictly for community-building and entertainment value rather than being an overt instructional aid. Both Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) and Dunlap & Lowenthal (2009) list categories of benefits of using Twitter in an educational setting. My use of course hashtags for community-building would likely be considered what Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) call "enhancing social interactions", "informal learning via informal communication" and "interaction beyond classrooms" and what Dunlap & Lowenthal (2009) call "supporting informal learning" and "maintaining on-going relationships".

Secondly, recognizing that I have an LMS for formal communication and content delivery, some of my tweets are still additional reminders, like the following:

Using Twitter for reminders aligns with what Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) categorize as "facilitating educational activities".

Third, my tweets using a course hashtag are sometimes a learning prompt meant to stimulate some critical thinking about our course content, like this example:

 

Tweeting a brief learning prompt like this aligns with what Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) call "facilitiating educational activities", "interaction beyond classrooms" and "supports process-oriented learning".

Finally, sometimes the tweet is promoting engagement in some kind of relevant extracurricular activity, like this tweet promoting an out-of-class livestream I was doing to supplement the course content:

Using a course hashtag to promote engagement in extra-curricular activities aligns with what Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) call "interaction beyond classrooms".

Lists

Prior to July of 2018, it was possible to easily make a search-based widget for Twitter. I found this useful, as I could make a Twitter widget for my course that included my username (@KyleDChapman) plus any course-related hashtags (e.g. #NETD3202) by searching for "from:@KyleDChapman OR #NETD3202". Some of my searches were considerably more complicated. Regardless, this feature no longer exists (Osborn, 2018).

Nowadays, the easiest way for a typical user to curate Twitter content for a specific audience is to make a Twitter List, which is a set of accounts whose tweets will be merged into one timeline to be embedded. Twitter has a useful page about lists here. Managing Lists isn't quite as customizable or automated as the old embedded search widgets, but if you have a specific set of accounts your students could benefit from watching, this can be very helpful.

Utilizing Lists has allowed me to, for example, have my field placement students watch my own account, my institution's account, a local job board-type account, and our institutional career services office account. Curating a list in this way aligns with the benefits that Dunlap & Lowenthal (2009) would categorize as "connecting with a professional community of practice".

Contacts

Of course, Twitter isn't just for dispersing content into the ether. If your students refuse to even observe it, there's no point using it. Fortunately, in teaching post-secondary courses, I find that many (but not all) of my students use Twitter to engage in hobby-related or professional communities, so when they see my tweets they will occasionally engage. If they find my content useful, they will also follow my account, and I generally follow back.

This is a neat way I can get to know my students. I get to see the other things they are interested in and I get to keep in touch with them after they graduate. Perhaps the best thing that has come of this is times I have been in touch with past students for the benefit of current students, like this one:

This doesn't end up being a two-way benefit for all of my students (or even most), but for those who engage, this carries clear benefit that Dhir, Buragga & Boreqqah (2013) might categorize as "enhancing social interactions", "informal learning via informal communication" and "interaction beyond classrooms" and what Dunlap & Lowenthal (2009) would consider to be "connecting with a professional community of practice", "supporting informal learning" and "maintaining on-going relationships".

Tools That Make This Easier

TweetDeck

TweetDeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) was once an independent piece of software that helped people to schedule future tweets and monitor multiple accounts, but now it is owned and administered by Twitter. Managing Lists as discussed above is considerably easier using TweetDeck.

Scheduling future tweets is a very useful feature. Doing this is easy using TweetDeck, which uses your regular Twitter login. This allows you to schedule tweets for a more appropriate time-of-day, which is very useful for many reasons - maybe you want to hit peak traffic, maybe you need a timely reminder for your students, or maybe you are embarrassed to be sending a tweet at 3 am. Scheduling some upcoming tweets also allows you to keep a more consistent social presence via Twitter.

There are many alternatives - HootSuite (https://hootsuite.com/) is a popular one, for example - but TweetDeck is the one that I have used the most.

All My Tweets

All My Tweets (https://www.allmytweets.net/) is a much lesser-known tool that I've made a fair bit of use of. Twitter content doesn't expire, but its mysterious search algorithm is designed around optimizing revenue (and thus factors in things like reputation and controversy). If you ever need to view past Twitter content from a specific account, All My Tweets provides a consistent way to do so.

Twitter also automatically loads images and other media content, which makes loading slower, and it loads content in "pages". All My Tweets reduces this content to plain text (with regular hyperlinks), loading very quickly. It can be useful for finding your own references to specific things, as I have found myself doing while writing this post.

Your old content can be pretty valuable; if you want a consistent social media presence, you need some content, and pulling in past material can be an asset for this. I find that All My Tweets can facilitate finding material for an #otd (on this day) or #tbt (throwback Thursday) post.

Sources

Airtight Interactive Inc. (n.d.). All My Tweets - View all your tweets on one page. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://www.allmytweets.net/

D2L Corporation. (2019, March 5). LE - How To Embed Your Twitter Feed Into Brightspace. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/000007190

Dhir, A., Buragga, K. & Boreqqah, A. (2013). Tweeters on campus: Twitter a learning tool in classroom? Journal of Universal Computer Science,  (19)5, 672-691

Dunlap, J. C., & Lowenthal, P. R. (2009). Tweeting the night away: Using Twitter to enhance social presence. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20, 129-135

Osborn, T. (2018, June 19). Revisions to Twitter search query both by @user and #hashtag. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://stackoverflow.com/posts/21744470/revisions

Twitter, Inc. (n.d.). Overview - Twitter Developers. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/timelines/overview.html

Twitter, Inc. (n.d.). How to use Twitter Lists. Retrieved July 5, 2019, from https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists