Microblogging in higher education: Digital Natives, knowledge creation, social engineering, and intelligence analysis of educational tweets

Abstract

With the rise of Web 2.0, microblogging has become a widely accepted phenomenon for sharing information. Moreover, the Twitter platform has become the tool of choice for universities looking to increase their digital footprint. However, scant research addresses the viability of microblogging as a tool to facilitate knowledge creation practices among higher education students. This paper proposes a model to explain how students, as digital natives, leverage the features of the Twitter microblogging for the transfer of knowledge. Finally, the paper examines the dark side of Twitter as a privacy-leaking platform and issues a call to higher institutions for specific security policies to prevent nefarious use.