“Pedagogical tweeting” in higher education: boon or bane?

Abstract

Social media have become widely adopted by the current generation of students. Yet, not every social media tool is as popular as others; for instance in 2016, 74.4% of Flemings ever had an account on Facebook, only 34.1% were once active on the microblogging platform Twitter. However, Twitter might have advantages over Facebook as a didactic agent in higher education. To date, research results on the added value of Twitter as a learning and teaching tool are still ambiguous. Therefore, this paper describes two interventions, which are evaluated using a mixed methods approach, to determine higher education students’ expectations and experiences about using Twitter for educational purposes. Results indicate that although students had moderate to high initial expectations about using Twitter in higher education, they were rather skeptical about this tool after using it. The most critical obstacles formulated by students were competence frustration, (information) overload, and extrinsic motivation; that were taken into account by designing the second, follow-up intervention. The results of both interventions are presented and discussed. This study also highlights practical implications regarding the educational use of Twitter as well as suggestions for further research.