On the other hand, few studies have also highlighted the negative aspects of incorporating Twitter in the educational context. Similarly, Twitter is deemed helpful in enhancing engagement and collaboration among peers, teachers, and students (Desselle, 2017 Greenhalgh, Rosenberg, & Wolf, 2016 Osatuyi & Passerini, 2016). For instance, Twitter has been reported to increase learning capabilities and communication (Bista, 2015 Carpenter, 2014 DeGroot, Young, & VanSlette, 2015). A number of recent studies have also demonstrated the value, impact, and acceptance of Twitter in the context of education. Students, scholars, and professionals from numerous academic domains use the network to connect and engage with peers and public to share discipline specific and other relevant information with an aim of pursuing their academic interests and goals (Holmberg & Thelwall, 2014 Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2016). More recently, Twitter is being encompassed as an augmented scholarly communication tool for formal and informal learning. Institutions of higher education, elementary and high schools, scholarly communities, as well as federal and state education agencies have actively embraced various social media platforms (Jordan, 2017 Wang, 2016). Besides using Twitter for entertainment and leisure, the platform is predominantly used for social interaction, information sharing, information seeking, self-documentation, and self-expression (Alhabash & Ma, 2017 Liu, Cheung, & Lee, 2010).Įven though social media platforms were not designed with the explicit purpose of supporting educational and other learning-related activities, their affordance for networking and content sharing have made them a natural fit for those purposes (Tess, 2013). 2019), elections (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013), and activism (Johri et al. Various aspects of Twitter practices has been researched in a number of domains including tourism (Sotiriadis & van Zyl, 2013), sports (Gibbs, O’Reilly, & Brunette, 2014), governance (Haro-de-Rosario, Sáez-Martín, & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, 2016), health information (Himelboim & Han, 2014 Malik et al. Furthermore, by features such as hashtags, mentions, and replies, users can network and dialog with other Twitter users (Steckenbiller, 2016). Twitter’s microblogging feature allows users to publish their ideas and opinions in “real-time messaging” format by writing tweets limited to certain number of characters (initially 140 but now up to 280). The study further points out that roughly one-quarter of online American adults use Twitter, with younger internet users being more active on Twitter when compared to older groups (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016). According to a recent study by Pew Research Center, Twitter is the fifth most popular social media platform among Americans. Recent statistics released by Twitter indicate that the network receives roughly 1 billion unique monthly visits and hosts around 313 million active users, with 82% being active mobile users (Twitter - Company, 2017). Twitter, which can be categorized as a specific form of social media activity – microblogging, was established in 2006 and is one of the prominent social media platforms (others include Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube) across the globe (Alhabash & Ma, 2017). Since their introduction around a decade ago, social media platforms and applications have become steadily popular among public and used widely for entertainment, socialization, and information seeking and sharing purposes (Dolan, Conduit, Fahy, & Goodman, 2016 Quan-Haase & Young, 2010 Malik et al. Finally, our analysis advocates for carrying out further empirical studies focusing on digital trace data and inference, particularly in the developing countries. Moreover, Twitter has the potential to enhance students’ learning capabilities as well as improve their motivation and engagement due to its unique features and non-traditional teaching approach. Students, teachers, and other stakeholders use it as a pedagogical tool to gain information, interact and engage with each other, participate in their respective communities of interests, and share their insights about specific topics.
Analysis of these studies signals Twitter as a useful tool for communication due to high accessibility, novelty, and real-time format. The majority of the studies reported in the literature are descriptive case studies carried out with students in North American and European higher education settings. In this article, we present findings from a review of 103 peer-reviewed scientific studies published over the last decade (2007–2017) that address the use of Twitter for educational purposes across formal and informal settings. Subsequently, the body of research on this topic is vibrant and growing. The use of social media across the educational landscape is on the rise.
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