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Twitter is a popular microblogging tool designed to answer the question "What are you doing?" The service launched in 2006, and in the past year has brought about an increase in unique visitors of 19 million per month . As defined by O'Reilly and Milstein, "Twitter is a messaging service that shares a lot of characteristics with communication tools you already use," and given its flexibility, "Twitter can fit with nearly anyone's workflow" . Users participate by posting status updates, or "tweets." Members may also connect with each other by "retweeting" or reposting a tweet and giving credit to the original poster. Additionally, users may "follow" someone to receive updates when the person in question tweets.
It was not too long before two researchers, Mason and Rennie started to discuss the implications of Twitter for educational purposes . They cite its popularity as one reason that many practitioners have the desire to adapt the service for an educational benefit, specifically by using hashtags so relevant topics can be followed and users can contribute to and discuss the conversation as long as # is affixed to a tweet . Hashtags exist for several purposes: professional associations and conferences (#sunycit09, #ala), geographic regions (#ROC, #WMass), current events (#NYMarriage), and courses (#idt507).
This article aims to explore the use of Twitter in an online learning environment. A study was conducted involving graduate students enrolled in the master's degree program in Information Design and Technology at the State University of New York (SUNY) Institute of Technology. To determine students' participation levels, the sense of community of the course, and perceived benefits of the course members when using Twitter.
DeVoe has written of the benefits of using Twitter as a means for "distributing other communications, such as RSS feeds, video, and images" as well as suggestions for getting 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