Thursday, 30 June 2011
Twitter or Facebook?
The use of Twitter is becoming widespread in modern business. Despite its 140 character limit, it has several advantages over Facebook for communication. But the vast majority of HE students are familiar with Facebook, not Twitter. Is it worth the effort to move them to Twitter for teaching? Comments please!
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I wonder if one way to think about this is in terms of learning environments? Even then there can be no conclusive position: institutionally we are using Yammer at Sheffield Hallam as it gives us our own 'twitter-like' microblogging spaces and that means we could set up rooms/discussions/spaces just for groups that we define as a university (though early days). As elsewhere, many of us use twitter, but I don't think we will get to a position where we'd expect all of our students to use it as a regular formal learning space. However, before I came here this evening I was designing a research project in which we will expect about 50 student participants to frequently reflect on their project involvement by posting tweets. To do this we will offer incentives for their participation and we are designing an induction process to ensure they are confident and comfortable with using the twitter environment. So this is more contractual. Facebook is a different environment again - as you say Chris, it is generally more user-centred - more of a 'home' type environment in which students would normally expect to play host. Obviously there's plenty of innovative educational activity in all of these spaces, but perhaps one commonality might be how they support engagement around the formal curriculum and often at the discretion of the students themselves rather than the direction of academics. I'm tempted to refer to Second Life at this stage, but will resist...
ReplyDeleteNowadays the web 2.0 technologies play an important role in our lifes. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook mostly used by teenagers. The main difference between these two is :
ReplyDeleteFacebook is describe as a passive tool, which can be used by friends and families to share pictuers or videos (private).
while Twitter is describe as an active tool, in which they can follow people and interact with the topic is highlighted to say their ideas (Public).
Facebook and Twitter have really taken over our lives. As a business man, I know now that 70% of my potential costumers surf Facebook every day, and I should market to them in advanced. Also, Google+ will probably make it's big break anyday now.
ReplyDeleteThe limit of characters is the major reason why learners will prefer facebook over twitter because facebook allows users to express their minds unlike twitter. Collaboration is enhanced more on facebook than twitter
ReplyDelete