Abstract:

The importance to provide an enriched education in college is not a new agenda. Educational context has been taken advantage of information systems and Internet to improve course quality, student engagement and consequently learning outcomes. Connectivity, interactivity, influence, instant feedback, borderless sharing, and co-creation are some of the most visible aspects that can help creating better and more successful ways of learning comparing to ordinary classroom activities that many students have used to over the last decades. Information Systems are used within distinct strategies, such as inside or outside class, in regular courses or in courses based on distance learning. Web 2.0 applications, such as forums, wikis, blogs, and microblogs are applied in education due to their potential for innovation and improvement of communication and interactivity.

Applications based on microblogging (with Twitter being one of the best-known) have been used by educators in a way to engage students in classroom by promoting interactivity and reflective learning. Microblogging is interesting due to its characteristics of novelty, facility to use, and interaction capability. In this paper, we designed a microblogging system to be tested with students using it in their classes. We chose a subject in an engineering course where exercises have to be solved collaboratively, since active experimentation is essential for students, as it enables them to obtain or reinforce knowledge by putting abstract theories into practice. Engineering straddles the boundary between abstract and experiential worlds, so learning experiences have to enable students to shuttle such boundary.

Our goal is to explore the potential of microblogging in improving learning experience through more harmonious and dynamic class atmosphere. Such context enables us to investigate various interesting learning perspectives and relevant factors. The introduction of a new system in class can be perceived as novelty by students and bring fun to routine. Student engagement, learning effectiveness, and learning satisfaction are fundamental factors that often determine the success of educational systems. A classroom with students instantly creates a social context. That naturally opens interplay of various social influence aspects. As microblogging by default enables active communication and interaction possibilities, one interesting factor to explore would be social learning, i.e. how students learn from each other. Depending on how microblogging is implemented, students often may also compare their performance with others, compete with others, or feel recognized for their participation.

Based on a conceptual background, we state two research questions:
(R1) “How microblogging in class contributes to fun, novelty, student engagement, learning effectiveness, learning satisfaction?”
(R2) “How to keep attractive the continuous use of microblogging in class?”.

We describe our experimental design. We outline data analysis and results. Results reveal that the system had the capacity to significantly increase fun, novelty, student engagement, learning effectiveness, and learning satisfaction in classrooms. The socially influencing version of the system contributed to increase fun and learning effectiveness. We conclude and indicate the potential for future research and application.

Keywords:

Education, microblogging, Twitter, socially influencing systems, engagement.