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social presence within the structure of a learning
management system (LMS).
What has consistently been lacking when we
rely on the LMS only is the informal, playful
banter and chit-chat that we have with students in
our on-campus courses. This banter helps students
connect with us and experience our personalities.
Also, it helps them connect with each other and us
in a more natural, immediate way; when relying
on an LMS for all student communication, the
delay involved in logging in, accessing the correct
course, locating the appropriate forum, posting
a comment or question, and then continuing to
monitor the forum while waiting for a response
leads to a formal, less-than-immediate exchange
of information. We determined to use Twitter,
therefore, because it had the potential to promote
the informal interaction we desired. However, we
quickly discovered that Twitter was also able to
engage students in a professional community of
practice—connecting them to practitioners, ex-
perts, and colleagues—that served to enculturate
them into the community (Dunlap & Lowenthal,
2009b). For example, our students experienced
these types of interactions in the Twitter com-
munity:
•
A student finds a great video about story-
boarding on YouTube and posts the URL
to Twitter. Her find is retweeted three times
because others also think the video is great
and worth sharing.
•
A student tweets that he just posted a new
entry to his blog on how vision trumps all
other senses during instruction and pro-
vides the URL. His classmates, as well
as other practicing professionals, read his
blog post. He receives three tweets thank-
ing him for sharing his ideas.
•
As part of a research project on legacy
systems, a student poses a question to the
Twitter community regarding the preva-
lent need for COBOL programmers. She
receives responses from several IT pro-
fessionals, some with links to helpful re-
sources and contacts that can help her with
research.
As illustrated by the examples above, students'
participation in Twitter allowed them to practice
with cultural exemplars, assume the roles of
practicing members of the community of practice,
and engage in direct instruction of cultural knowl-
edge and activities—the very activities needed to
develop lifelong learning skills and dispositions
(Dunlap & Grabinger, 2003).
•
A student has a question about the chapter
on multimodal learning. She immediately
tweets her question to the Twitter commu-
nity, and gets three responses within ten
minutes—two responses from classmates,
and one from her professor. This leads to
several subsequent posts, including com-
ments from two practicing professionals.
Facebook / MySpace / Ning
As popular as Twitter is, social networking sites
like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/),
MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/), and Ning
(http://www.ning.com/) have many more users and
more visits to their sites each month (Goldman,
2009). [Note: Ning changed their pricing structure
in 2010, which is likely to influence their popular-
ity in the future.] For example, Facebook alone
has an estimated 300 million users (Facebook,
n.d.). These larger networks arguably have even
more potential for lifelong learning than smaller
networks like Twitter. Educators, though, need to
•
A student working on an assignment is
wondering about embedding music into a
presentation. He tweets a question and gets
a response from his professor and a prac-
ticing professional. Both point the student
to different resources that explain how to
embed music and provide examples to de-
construct. Within a half hour, the student
has embedded music in his presentation.
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