Originally published in Future Learning Journal, Vol. 1 (2012)
My college, Dr. Ruth Small, and I studied the use of Twitter for student engagement and motivation in two of my courses: Social Media for the Enterprise and Star Trek and the Information Age. You can read the full article published in Future Learning Journal.
Ruth described our project in an interview with Educational Technology:
"Currently, I'm doing some work on the use of social media in instruction and its impact on student learning and motivation. I am working with a colleague, Anthony Rotolo, who uses twitter in his classes in the most amazing ways. By the end of the course, students tweet him how they wish the course could continue, and many students continue to tweet into future classes long after their particular class has ended. We recently wrote an article about his classes for the inaugural issue of Future Learning.
Anthony and I and some graduate students are analyzing more than 6000 tweets to see if we can figure out how and why his use of social media has had such a dramatic effect on student curiosity and motivation. It's really interesting stuff and not easy to analyze. In fact, we're exploring if and how natural language processing tolls can help analyze these data."
Article Summary
The goals of this article are (1) to describe two courses that use Twitter for instructor- student and student-student communications and to motivate learning engagement and (2) describe an analysis of the “motivational quality” of these Twitter-based learning environments using the ARCS Model of Motivational Design as a framework for analysis.
Citation:
Small, Ruth V. and Rotolo, Anthony, 2012. Motivating learning engagement through Twitter both In and On the enterprise. Future Learning 1, 33-42.