Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 302

Dunlap, 2006; Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Stepien & Gallagher, 1993); and

Twitter community share ideas and resources, ask
and answer questions, and collaborate on problems
of practice; in a recent study, researchers found
that the main communication intentions of people
participating in Twitter could be categorized as
daily chatter, conversations, sharing resources/
URLs, and reporting news (Java et al., 2007).
Twitter community members post their contri-
butions to Twitter via the Twitter website, mobile
phone, email, and/or a Twitter client like Twirl—
making it a powerful, convenient, community-
controlled microsharing environment (Drapeau,
2009). Depending on whom you choose to follow
(i.e., communicate with) and who chooses to
follow you, Twitter can be effectively used for
professional and social networking (Drapeau,
2009; Thompson, 2007) because it can connect
people with like interests (Lucky, 2009). This
becomes especially important for students because
by following other professionals in their field on
Twitter, they can begin to see how professionals in
their field interact (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009a,
2009b) and, therefore, slowly become enculturated
in the professional community they are entering.
Besides the networking potential, students can
also receive immediate feedback on their ques-
tions and ideas from practicing professionals on
Twitter (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009a, 2009b),
which serves to enhance their learning and their
enculturation into their professional community
of practice.
In our university courses, we invite students to
participate in Twitter with us. Our initial reason
for adopting Twitter as an instructional tool was
because we wanted to have an informal, just-in-
time way for our online students to connect with
each other and with us throughout the day. We
have an overarching interest in enhancing social
presence in online learning experiences (Dunlap
& Lowenthal, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b; Lowenthal
& Dunlap, 2010; Lowenthal, 2009; Lowenthal
& Parscal, 2008), and have found that we cannot
accomplish all we want to accomplish in terms of

• Direct instruction in cultural knowledge

and activities where students engage in
leading, recording, discussing, facilitating,
making decisions, collaborating, confront-
ing misconceptions and ineffective strate-
gies, making presentations, and evaluating
the learning activity (Brown, Collins, &
Duguid, 1989).

The National Research Council's prominent
study on “How People Learn” (Bransford, Brown,
& Cocking, 2000) calls for students to be con-
nected to outside practitioners and professional
communities of practice in ways that allow for
feedback, reflection, and revision opportunities—
in other words, it recommends that educators find
opportunities to enculturate students into profes-
sional communities of practice. The Web is a
great source for opportunities to develop students'
self-directed learning skills and metacognitive
awareness within a discipline while connecting
them with communities of practice (Dunlap &
Lowenthal, 2009b). Two categories of Web 2.0
technologies that are particularly useful when it
comes to enculturating students into a community
of practice and, therefore, developing self-directed
learning skills and metacognitive awareness for
lifelong learning are microsharing tools such
as Twitter and social networking tools such as
Facebook, MySpace, and Ning.

Twitter

Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) is a multiplat-
form Web 2.0, part social networking—part
microblogging tool, freely accessibly on the Web
(Stevens, 2008) with an estimated 18 million users
(Ostrow, 2009). Twitter's website describes Twit-
ters as, “a service for friends, family, and co-work-
ers to communicate and stay connected through
the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” In 140
characters or less, people who participate in the