Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence

Dunlap, Joanna C.; Lowenthal, Patrick R.

Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 20(2)

129

Teaching Tip

Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social

Presence

Joanna C. Dunlap

School of Education & Human Development /

Center for Faculty Development

University of Colorado Denver

Denver, CO, USA

joni.dunlap@ucdenver.edu

Patrick R. Lowenthal

CU Online

School of Education & Human Development

University of Colorado Denver

Denver, CO, USA

patrick.lowenthal@ucdenver.edu

ABSTRACT

To be truly effective, online learning must facilitate the social process of learning. This involves providing space and

opportunities for students and faculty to engage in social activities. Although learning management systems offer several tools

that support social learning and student engagement, the scope, structure, and functionality of those tools can inhibit and

restrain just-in-time social connections and interactions. In this teaching tip, we describe our use of Twitter to encourage free-

flowing just-in-time interactions and how these interactions can enhance social presence in online courses. We then describe

instructional benefits of Twitter, and conclude with guidelines for incorporating Twitter in online courses.

Keywords: Social Presence, Teaching Presence, Cognitive Presence, Online Learning, Twitter, Social Interaction,

Microblogging, Microsharing, Community Of Inquiry, Social Networking, Student Engagement

1. INTRODUCTION

Many online educators tend to design the scope, structure,

and function of an online course based on the tools available

within a learning management system (LMS); that is, an

LMS (e.g., eCollege, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle) can

constrain how online educators design and develop their

online courses (Lane, 2007; Morgan, 2003; Siemens, 2006).

While adequate for some basic learning activities (e.g.,

information and document sharing, asynchronous and

synchronous discussion, and assessment via quizzes), LMSs

are modeled after classroom settings with drop boxes, grade

books, announcements, and so on. What tends to be missing

is the just-in-time, and sometimes playful, interactions that

happen before and after class, during a break, and when

students and faculty bump into each other between class

meetings. Out-of-the-classroom interactions like these and

many others have potential instructional value (Kuh, 1995)

and can help strengthen interpersonal relationships between

and among students and faculty that enhance the learning

community inside the classroom.

In this teaching tip, we describe our use of Twitter

(2009)—a Web 2.0, microblogging tool—to enhance social

presence in an online course by providing a mechanism for

just-in-time social interactions. We also touch on some other

instructional benefits of using Twitter in online courses and

conclude with guidelines to consider when using Twitter

with students.

2. THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL PRESENCE

Learning is a very human activity. The more

people feel they are being treated as human

beings—that their human needs are being taken

into account—the more they are likely to learn

and learn to learn. (Knowles, 1990, pp. 129)

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130

When we design and teach online, we build in authentic and

relevant opportunities for our students to interact and

connect not only with the content but also with the instructor

and each other (Dunlap, Dobrovolny, & Young, 2008;

Dunlap, Furtak, & Tucker, 2009; Dunlap, Sobel & Sands,

2007). In fact, students see social interaction and connection

as a foundational attribute of our courses. We attend to the

“socialness” of the courses we design and teach because we

subscribe to the theory that learning, as a human activity,

occurs within a social context, with higher cognitive

processes originating from social interactions (Vygotsky,

1978). We also believe that social interaction and connection

has significant influence over student engagement.

A commonly used framework for “best practices” in

undergraduate and graduate education, Chickering and

Gamson’s (1987) Seven Principles of Good Practice in

Education, describes seven principles that faculty can

embrace to improve education. Developed from a review of

fifty years of educational literature, Chickering and

Gamson’s first principle is, “Encourages contact between

students and faculty.” This first principle is influenced by

instructor immediacy behaviors and participant interaction,

with both having a positive influence on student learning and

course satisfaction (Arbaugh, 2001, 2005; Baker, 2004; Hiltz

and Wellman, 1997; Swan, 2002).

Contact between students and faculty in and outside of

class is critical for student engagement because it influences

student motivation and involvement. When faculty stay in

touch with students through formal and informal

communication and dialogue, students report that it helps

them get through the rough times and keep on working.

Knowing their instructors enhances students' intellectual

commitment and encourages them to think about their own

values and plans (Chickering and Ehrmann, 1996).

Social presence, along with cognitive and teaching

presence, is well established in the online education literature

as a way of thinking about social connection and interaction

for student engagement in online courses. As a component of

the Community of Inquiry framework (see Garrison,

Anderson, & Archer, 2000), social presence refers to the

“ability of participants in a Community of Inquiry to project

their personal characteristics into the community, thereby

presenting themselves to other participants as ‘real people’”

(Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000, pp. 89). Originally

developed to explain the effect telecommunications media

can have on communication, social presence was used to

describe the degree of salience (i.e., quality or state of “being

there”) between two communicators using a communication

medium (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976).

Social presence theory took on new importance with the

rise of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and later

online learning (Lowenthal, in press, 2009). Now a central

concept in online learning, researchers have shown—to

varying degrees—a relationship between social presence and

student satisfaction (Gunawardena, 1995; Gunawardena and

Zittle, 1997; Richardson and Swan, 2003), social presence

and the development of a community of learners (Rourke,

Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001; Rovai, 2002), and

social presence and perceived learning (Richardson and

Swan, 2003). Because of results like these, researchers and

practitioners alike continue to try out different ways to

establish and maintain social presence in online courses. For

instance, Aragon (2003) identified over a dozen different

ways to create social presence in online courses (e.g.,

incorporating audio and video, posting introductions,

frequent feedback). Others have looked at ways to create and

maintain social presence by using tools outside of an LMS.

For instance, DuVall, Powell, Hodge, and Ellis (2007)

investigated using text messaging to improve social

presence. Also, Keil and Johnson (2002) investigated using

Internet based voice mail to increase social presence.

3. SOCIAL PRESENCE AND TWITTER

Although the typical LMS provides tools that—when used

appropriately—can establish and increase social presence

(e.g., asynchronous discussions, synchronous chat tools), the

tools reside within the online system. Because students and

faculty have to login and navigate to several different

locations in the course to engage in discussion, collaboration,

and sharing, the communication is sometimes forced and out

of the context of day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-

minute experience. In other words, communication between

and among students and faculty is scheduled based on when

they have a moment to login to the LMS. This means that

there are many lost opportunities during the day to interact

and connect.

Another challenge of encapsulating all social interaction

and connection opportunities within a LMS is that we tend to

lose the informal, free-flowing, just-in-time banter and chit-

chat that we have with students in our on-campus courses—

the banter that helps us get to know each other, experience

our personalities, and connect on a more emotional level.

This sort of informal connection between and among

students and faculty is one aspect of cultivating student

engagement and social presence. Although we have tried to

address this within the LMS by incorporating weekly fun

activities (such as coming up with captions for goofy photos,

or competing in online games), establishing discussion

forums on non-academic topics, having students produce

music playlists for the week, and the like, these strategies do

not seem to do enough to enhance social presence. As a

result, we have been looking for additional ways to enhance

social presence.

Twitter immediately seemed like an additional way to

enhance social presence. Twitter (2009) is a multiplatform

Web 2.0, part social networking - part microblogging tool,

freely accessibly on the Web (Stevens, 2008). Other popular

Web 2.0 microblogging tools include Jaiku, Tumblr, MySay,

and Hictu, and Edmodo. Twitter, however, is one of the most

popular of these microblogging tools (Java, Finin, Song, &

Teseng, 2007; McFedries, 2007) and, therefore, was our tool

of choice because it is well-established, has a large and

growing participant base, interfaces well with other Web 2.0

tools, and is easily accessible.

According to the Twitter website, Twitter is a service

for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay

connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers

to one simple question: What are you doing? (Twitter, 2009)

However, the people who participate in the Twitter

community—people who are geographically distributed

across all continents (with North America, Europe, and Asia

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having the highest adoption rate) (Java et al.,2007)—use it

for more than providing updates on their current status.

In 140 characters or less, people 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

contributions via the Twitter website (see Figure 1), mobile

phone, email, and instant messaging—making Twitter 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). And all of this communication

happens in real-time, so the exchange of information is

immediate (Parry, 2008a; Young, 2008).

Figure 1. Twitter Website

4. TWITTER IN ACTION

Faculty have recently begun experimenting with how to use

Twitter in the “classroom” (Parry, 2008a). Parry explains

that despite his initial skepticism, he found that Twitter could

be an effective tool in the classroom in part because of its

ability to “blur the lines of the classroom” (Parry, 2008b).

An example of how Parry uses Twitter in his classroom can

be found online (see Parry, 2007).

Communication faculty are not the only one’s using

Twitter in the classroom. Twitter has also been used in

public relations (Sweetser, 2008), project management

(Keefer, 2008), medical education (van den Broek, 2009),

language learning (Ullrich, Borau, Luo, Tan, L. Shen, & R.

Shen, 2008), and information systems (Sendall, Ceccucci, &

Peslak, 2008) courses, to name a few.

During the fall of 2008, we incorporated Twitter into our

online instructional design and technology courses. We did

not require students to participate, but invited them to join us

in our Twitter adventure as we tested its instructional

potential. Although not everyone chose to participate, most

did with positive results. The following describes our

students’ typical experiences using Twitter:

• A student is reading something in the textbook and has

a question about the chapter on multimodal learning.

She immediately tweets (i.e., posts) her question to the

Twitter community, and gets three responses within ten

minutes)—two responses from classmates, and one

from Joni (her professor). This leads to several

subsequent posts, including comments from two

practicing professionals.

• A student is working on an assignment and is

wondering about embedding music into a slideshow

presentation. He tweets a question to the group and gets

a response from Patrick (his professor) and a practicing

professional. Both point the student to different online

resources that explain how to embed music and provide

examples to deconstruct. Within a half hour, the student

has embedded music in his slideshow presentation.

• A student sends a private tweet (i.e., a private message

that only the named recipient receives) to Joni regarding

a difficult situation with a project team member. While

in the middle of a departmental meeting, Joni

immediately tweets back, arranging a time to talk with

the student outside of Twitter.

• A student cannot believe what she has just heard on the

news regarding federal funding of higher education and

needs to share. She tweets her comment, and

immediately connects with others who cannot believe it

either.

• A student finds a great video about storyboarding on

YouTube and posts the URL to Twitter. Her find is

retweeted (i.e., reposted) three times because others also

think the video is great and worth sharing.

• Joni and Patrick, who are both away at conferences,

tweet various updates about what they are hearing and

seeing at the conference.

• Several of the students are posting comments to Twitter

while they watch a political debate. They provide

commentary, along with several thousand others who

are also in Twitter while watching the debate.

• A student tweets that he just posted a new entry to his

blog on how vision trumps all other senses during

instruction and provides the URL. His classmates, as

well as other practicing professionals, read his blog

post. He receives three tweets thanking 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 prevalent need for COBOL programmers.

She receives responses from several IT professionals,

some with links to helpful resources and contacts that

can help her with research.

• A student tweets that she is tired and going off to bed.

She receives two tweets back from classmates wishing

her a good night.

Throughout the course, we used Twitter in this way. By

using a tool that enables just-in-time communication with the

local (our course) and global (practicing professionals)

community, we were able to engage in sharing,

collaboration, brainstorming, problem solving, and creating

within the context of our moment-to-moment experiences.

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Because of Twitter’s ability to enable persistent presence

(Siemens, 2007), our social interactions occurred more

naturally and immediately than when we have to login to the

LMS, navigate to the appropriate discussion forum, post a

message, and then wait for someone to respond (after we

already moved on to other work, thoughts, and issues).

5. OTHER INSTRUCTIONAL BENEFITS

OF TWITTER

Besides the benefit of enhancing the potential for positive

social presence during online learning opportunities, Twitter

has other instructional benefits.

5.1 Addressing Student Issues in a Timely Manner

Our students used Twitter for time-sensitive matters: to ask

us for clarification on content or assignment requirements,

notify us of personal emergencies, and alert us to issues that

need our attention and action. Even though we log into the

LMS several times a day, this immediate communication

allowed us to attend to issues in a timely manner. On a few

occasions, we were able to intervene before an issue spiraled

out of control, as with a team that was having trouble

meeting the requirements of a project. Twitter is a helpful

tool for addressing student issues quickly.

5.2 Writing Concisely

Because a tweet is limited to 140 characters, this encourages

students to write clearly and concisely. Although a very

informal writing style, it is a professionally useful skill for

students to develop, especially given the growing popularity

of this category of communication tool.

5.3 Writing for an Audience

Although Twitter elicits open sharing and an informal

writing style, it is nevertheless critical to know your

audience and share accordingly. Participating in the Twitter

community helped our students learn to be sensitive to their

audience, and make professional decisions about what

perspectives and ideas they should publically contribute and

what perspectives and ideas should remain private.

5.4 Connecting with a Professional Community of

Practice

A great benefit of participating in Twitter is that many

practicing professionals also participate. In our courses, for

example, a number of the textbook authors participate in

Twitter. Besides the networking potential, students receive

immediate feedback to their questions and ideas from

practicing professionals, which serves to reinforce the

relevance of Twitter participation and enhance their

understanding of our course content and their enculturation

into the professional community of practice.

5.5 Supporting Informal Learning

Informal learning involves “activities that take place in

students’ self-directed and independent learning time, where

the learning is taking place to support a formal program of

study, but outside the formally planned and tutor-directed

activities” (Aspden and Thorpe, 2009). Twitter was one tool

that students used to support their informal learning

activities. Through their participation in the Twitter

community, they discovered resources and tools that they

effectively applied to their coursework.

5.6 Maintaining On-going Relationships

Student and faculty use of Twitter is not bound by the

structure of an LMS or the timing of a semester. Twitter

enables faculty and students to maintain on-going

relationships after a course ends. Although the semester is

over, we are still in daily communication with several

students from the courses. This allows us to continue to

advise students academically and professionally. It has also

allowed for a much more natural and organic progression of

our relationships; instead of severing our connections at the

end of the semester, we are able to continue to be in

community together, learning from each other and sharing

our moment-to-moment experiences.

5.7 Possible Drawbacks of Twitter

Like most, if not all Web 2.0 tools, Twitter is not appropriate

for all instructional situations. For instance, Grosseck and

Holotescu (2008) identify a number of problems with using

Twitter for educational purposes. For instance, Twitter can

be time-consuming, addictive, and possibly even encourage

bad grammar as a result of its 140-character limit (Grosseck

and Holotescu, 2008). Further, while Twitter is free to use on

a computer connected to the Web (whether accessed via a

web browser or a Twitter client like Twirl), faculty and

students might be charged texting or data fees if they access

Twitter on their cell phone (depending on their cell phone

plans). See Grosseck and Holotescu (2008) and Lavallee

(2007) for a complete list of drawbacks of using Twitter for

educational purposes.

Despite possible drawbacks like these, the instructional

benefits encourage us to continue to incorporate Twitter in

our online courses (as one more tool in our toolbox), and

look at other Web 2.0 tools that may help us extend the

instructional power of a LMS and further enhance the social-

presence potential of the online learning opportunities we

design and facilitate.

6. GUIDELINES FOR USING TWITTER

WITH STUDENTS

Based on our experience using Twitter with our online

students, we offer the following five guidelines:

6.1 Establish Relevance for Students

First and foremost, the use of Twitter in an online course

needs to be relevant—have a clear purpose—for students to

attend to it in personally, professionally, and academically

meaningful ways. If students see using Twitter in a particular

course as irrelevant then they will fail to participate in

Twitter as hoped, and will fail to take anything of value

away from the experience. Our strategy has been to show

students examples of the ways we have benefited from using

Twitter, such as the resources we have discovered that

support our work, writing, and course learning activities;

professionals we have met and are now in consistent contact

with; and the audience we have attracted to our various

projects and products. We also share with students the fun

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(e.g., tweeting with a celebrity) and informative (e.g.,

receiving product updates or news items) networking

opportunities available via Twitter. When students see the

possibilities and how those possibilities can help them meet

specific learning goals and objectives, they are willing to

give it a try.

6.2 Define Clear Expectations for Participation

Regardless of your expectations for student participation in

Twitter, expectations for participation have to be clearly

articulated. Our preference has been to invite and strongly

encourage students to participate instead of requiring their

participation. In support of our invitation, we define our

expectations as setting up a Twitter account, adding all class

members and faculty as tweets, adding 2-3 professionals

(usually our textbook authors) as tweets, and committing to

logging into Twitter three times a day for two weeks. If after

that point students determine it is not of value to them, then

we do not expect them to continue participating. In fact, we

post any important questions asked about the course on

Twitter back in the LMS (in much the same way we do with

questions asked via email) in an effort not to penalize

students who do not continue to use Twitter. However, we

have found that after those initial two weeks most students

decide to continue to participate in Twitter for the duration

of the course and beyond. Note: Related to expectations for

participation, it is important to remind students that Twitter

is a public forum, requiring them to exhibit decorum in all of

their Twitter interactions.

6.3 Model Effective Twitter Use

We make every effort to model effective Twitter use for our

students by being active participants in the Twitter

community. Through our modeling, students are exposed to

effective strategies for connecting with other professionals,

asking and answering questions, sharing resources, and

friendly networking. Enhancing social presence using

Twitter requires being socially present in Twitter.

6.4 Build Twitter-derived Results into Assessment

We encourage students to use information and resources

derived through Twitter participation—triangulated with

other more conventional references—in research papers and

presentations. We then assess students on the relevance and

accuracy of their citations, including those derived from

Twitter. In this way, we reinforce the value of Twitter as a

professional resource, and give students credit—and

points—for using Twitter to meet professional and academic

goals.

6.5 Continue to Actively Participate in Twitter

We have made a commitment to continue to participate in

the Twitter community after courses are completed. We

believe that this commitment further encourages students to

engage in Twitter, building their own valuable network of

professional and academic contacts. Because they know they

can count on us being available in Twitter, they continue to

use Twitter as a just-in-time way to connect and interact with

each other and us. This has been helpful for continued

advising, coaching, and mentoring. Ultimately, following

this guideline has helped us achieve the level of social

presence we crave in support of on-going social learning and

student engagement.

7. CONCLUSION

We set out to enhance the social-presence potential of our

online courses using Twitter. That is, we believed that the

synchronous just-in-time nature of Twitter could provide us

and our students with opportunities to connect and be

perceived as “real” in ways that traditional LMS contained

tools could not. The feedback from our students suggests that

Twitter accomplished just this for many of them:

Twitter has been a great way for me to check in with

everyone who is using it. I found out how other’s

were feeling about school, how life was treating

them, how their jobs and families were doing. This is

something much more intimate than mandatory

weekly discussions, although they carry their own

merit.

I really LOVE twittering with everyone. It really

made me feel like we knew each other more and

were actually in class together.

Twitter was a big part of my connected-ness, with

course colleagues and with you. Even though I didn’t

post a lot of tweets, I watched the Twitter dialogue. It

made the connections stronger and helped me learn

more about folks in the course and you. And, Twitter

led me to some great resources. Thanks, Joni, for

being such a responsive Twitterer.

We also, and unexpectedly, concluded that involving

students in the Twitter community also helps us attend to the

other two components of the Community of Inquiry

framework: cognitive and teaching presence.

7.1 Cognitive Presence

Cognitive presence is “the extent to which the participants

in… a community of inquiry are able to construct meaning

through sustained communication” (Garrison, Anderson, &

Archer, 2000, pp. 89). Interacting with us and other

professional practitioners in Twitter, our students constructed

meaning through sustained communication.

7.2 Teaching Presence

Teaching presence is the ability of a teacher or teachers to

support and enhance social and cognitive presence through

instructional management, building understanding, and direct

instruction. Reflecting on the additional instructional benefits

of Twitter, we clearly engaged in interactions with our

students via Twitter that helped us attend to instructional

management issues and students’ knowledge building.

We encourage others to begin experimenting with

Twitter in their classroom. However, formal and systematic

research is needed to truly assess the value of using Twitter

in the classroom as well as its relationship to social presence.

All in all, though, we have found Twitter to be a powerful

tool for establishing informal, free-flowing, just-in-time

communication between and among students and faculty,

and with the professional community at large.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Joni Dunlap is an associate professor of instructional design

and technology at the

University of

Colorado Denver. An award-winning

educator, her teaching and research

interests focus on the use of

sociocultural approaches to enhance

adult learners’ development and

experience in postsecondary settings.

For over 12 years, she has directed,

designed, delivered and facilitated

distance and eLearning educational

opportunities for a variety of audiences. Joni is also the

university's Faculty Fellow for Teaching, working through

the Center for Faculty Development to help online and on-

campus faculty enhance their teaching practice.

Patrick Lowenthal is an Academic Technology Coordinator

at CU Online at the University of

Colorado Denver. He is also a

doctoral student studying instructional

design and technology in the School

of Education and Human

Development. His research interests

focus on instructional communication,

with a specific focus on social and

teaching presence, in online and face-

to-face environments. In addition, he

often writes about issues and problems of practice related to

post-secondary education. He also has a MA in Instructional

Design and Technology as well as a MA in the Academic

Study of Religion. Patrick has been teaching and designing

instruction since 1998 and teaching online since 2003.