Tweeting for class: co-construction as a means for engaging students in lectures

Authors:
Jeremy Birnholtz;Jeff Hancock;Daniela Retelny
Affiliations:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA;Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA;Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2013

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Abstract

Motivating students to be active learners is a perennial problem in education, and is particularly challenging in lectures where instructors typically prepare content in ad-vance with little direct student participation. We describe our experience using Twitter as a tool for student "co-construction" of lecture materials. Students were required to post a tweet prior to each lecture related to that day's topic, and these tweets -- consisting of questions, examples and reflections -- were incorporated into the lecture slides and notes. Students reported that they found lectures including their tweets in the class slides to be engaging, interactive and relevant, and nearly 90% of them recommended we use our co-construction approach again.