g started including ideas on how to create an online presence [4, 5]. But, unfortunately, very little scholarly material exists that discusses Twitter in an educational context. An article in Read Write Web profiles Monica Rankin, a professor of history at the University of Texas, Dallas, who uses "hashtag[s] to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class," resulting in more active class discussions . Also the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a similar professor at Pennsylvania State, Cole W. Camplese, who encourages back-channel communication during his courses .
A thorough review of the literature must also discuss the social aspect of information, how information becomes knowledge, and how people find information. Buckland highlights the primary difference between information and knowledge in stating "knowledge, belief, and opinion are personal, subjective, and conceptual" , and identifies communication as basic type of information system in his manuscript. It is the intangible nature of knowledge that separates it from information. Buckland's ideas can be combined with John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid's concept that people are the most important part of knowledge . The two authors discuss a study by anthropologist Julian Orr that examines the use of chat to foster knowledge sharing. The study denotes "chat continuously but almost imperceptibly adjusts a group's collective knowledge and individual members' awareness of each other," stories are a "means to understand what happened and why," and retelling a story constitutes a means of learning, thereby binding people through interpretation of a shared concept .
Peter Moreville separates from Buckland and Brown and Duguid by discussing the social aspects of knowledge in the context of findability . Moreville concerns himself with how users find information. With notions of push and pull from the Web, he describes the nodes and links to connect people to information, which ties in nicely with an article written by Jansen, Zhang, Sobel and Chowdury. In describing electronic word of mouth (eWOM), specifically tweets, the authors found that "consumers increasingly use these communication technologies for trusted sources of information, insights, and opinions" . However it is important to include that before their 2009 study, there were no previous research completed to examine microblogging and eWOM communication.
Starting with frequency, 17 respondents rated themselves as being either occasionally or very active, with a level of participation of at least every few weeks. It is interesting to note that 77 percent of respondents did not participate in Twitter prior to this course. Of that population, two-thirds came across course-relevant information. On the contrary, only one of the give individuals who used Twitter prior to the course discovered course-relevant information.
The study also chose to examine whether or not Twitter had any bearing on the sense of community in an online course. Overwhelmingly, 86 percent responded in the affirmative; a sense of community was important to the targeted graduate students.
Comparing Twitter to other social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, the initial result of the survey was 15 people believed that there was no uniqueness to Twitter. However, 40 percent of respondents still found course-relevant information through its use. Concerning those who did see Twitter as unique, seven respondents two did not find course-relevant information using Twitter. However those two respondents admitted to connecting with people outside of the course. In turn two-thirds of students felt equally as close or closer to students in an online course when Twitter was not used. Among the seven respondents who said that Twitter had brought them closer to classmates, only one person had previously used Twitter. Interestingly the frequency of use varied with four reporting themselves as very active, two reporting as occasionally active, and one reporting as rarely active.
In question 11,