Abstract:

Information and communication technologies have had a profound impact on the academic environment during the last few years, which – according to international studies – will be an ongoing development. The importance of media literacy is constantly growing and can already be seen as an indispensable qualification in higher education. User-generated Web 2.0-content is spreading quickly in the context of education. The success of Facebook, Wikipedia and Message Boards demonstrates perfectly that, a major part of student’s communication and information seeking takes place far away from the university’s orbit.
In this context, the present paper aims at reutilizing these externally used communication channels internally to generate sustainable collaborative knowledge. The larger a group is, the harder it is to lead a reasonable discussion. In a few pilot projects Twitter was used as a tool to facilitate large class education, but empirical studies are scarce up to now. During a field trip to a well-known German IT exhibition and conference, where 56 first-semester IT students were given an opportunity to become more familiar with the IT business sector, the question of whether Twitter is perceived as a useful tool to deepen and support information-sharing and knowledge gathered during field trips was tested.
Previously, within a lecture, a simple show of hands indicated that only one student was an active Twitter-user, but virtually every student had a laptop or, respectively a Smartphone that could enable access to Twitter. For the planned field trip the students had to form groups of three to five persons and organize one laptop or Smartphone per group. The students’ tasks were to post Tweets concerning the topic “IT-Trends 2010”, to provide their fellow students useful information and for example, to give their opinion on presentations and speeches. During the whole field trip the students were also mentored by teaching staff via Twitter.
Shortly after the field trip each participating student had to hand in a written personal statement describing the perceived usefulness of Twitter concerning their learning-experience. Those 56 written statements were evaluated via GABEK® - an advanced qualitative research method providing a number of analysis steps in order to collect unordered knowledge and systematize it – and acted as a pre-study for the conducted focus group, which consisted of both students and lecturers.
Results show that students accept Twitter as a new creative technique that especially supports group dynamics when it comes to large group communication. The short format and ease of use lead to a real-time, fast and up-to-date information flow and, as a consequence of the documentation to a collective knowledge base. Nevertheless some negative aspects were mentioned, especially representing the opinion that the documented knowledge is hard to filter and also unorganized. This aspect is still a consideration. A consequent use of predefined “hashtags” could be a possible solution for this problem and a possible topic for further research.

Keywords:

Twitter, large group communication, collaborative knowledge, eLearning.