Keeping college students off social media sites and focused on the course material is a daily challenge for many of today’s college faculty. But what if you could harness the power of today’s technologies and students’ proclivity toward social networking to enhance the learning experience rather than distract from it?
Results of our second annual survey on Twitter usage and trends in higher education are now available. The survey of nearly 1,400 college faculty members found that more than a third (35.2 percent) of the 1,372 respondents use Twitter in some capacity. That’s an increase from 30.7 percent in 2009.
If it seems like everyone is tweeting these days, it’s not just your imagination.
In 2007 Twitter users, as a whole, made about 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 the number had increased to 300,000 per day, before growing to 2.5 million per day in January 2009. Just one year later, in January 2010, the figure jumped to 50 million tweets per day.
With interest in Twitter on the rise, many instructors continue to grapple with the question of whether it has a place in the college classroom. And, if it does, what is the best, most effective way to use it? So perhaps it comes as no surprise that we’re starting to see studies on the use of Twitter in both traditional and online courses.