1. As the Tweety Bird Flies: Using
Twitter for Research (and Education)
Barbara Z. Johnson

2. What is Twitter???

3. Twitter is …
 Microblogging
 Arranged chronologically
 Broadcast (one to unlimited number of people)
 Self published
 Unedited, democratic, free-for-all
 140 characters per entry
 Free
 Open
 Multiple platforms and programs can access and post

4. General Process
 Create a Twitter account (www.twitter.com)
 Follow some friends
 Write some updates = you tweet!
 Check in on the stream of information periodically
 Search for particular topics
 Similar to
 Facebook and MySpace status updates but with less
baggage
 Foursquare

5. Useful for??
 Spreading news and short updates
 Sharing links
 Nice back channel for events, workshops, and even
classrooms
 What’s a back channel??
 A way for an audience to communicate with each other during a
presentation and/or feed questions and comments to the
presenter to address during a break

6. Some more terms
 Following – someone chooses to include your tweets
in their main feed
 Mentions/replies – someone includes your Twitter
account name and the “@” sign
 Retweets – someone “forwards” your tweet to THEIR
list of followers
 Hashtags (#) – categorizes tweets into groups
related to a subject
 Lists – Curated lists by users to group other users –
may be public or private

7. You Choose
 What to share about yourself
 What to write
 Who to follow
 How to get updates (web page, smart phone, desktop
feed)

8. Safety and control
 Can block people and prevent them from following
you
 Choose to show location or not
 Write your own description of yourself
 May choose not to use a picture of yourself
 Too many tweets? Off topic tweets? Off color
tweets?
 Stop following that person or group
 Report the person or group
 Don’t have tweets sent to smart phone
 Use search and follow lists rather than people

9. Twitter for Research
 Record short and frequent observations
 Replaces a notebook or journal
 Saved on the internet
 Does not need to be typed up
 Accessible by researcher real time without waiting for
students to hand in materials
 May include pictures (See TwitPic)
 Use the List feature to collect the tweets of
participants or students
 Participants tweet directly to a dedicated account
(@)

10. Case Study
 “Where Do You Learn?”: Tweeting to Inform Learning
Space Development by Elizabeth J. Aspden and
Louise P. Thorpe (2009)
 15 students over 2 weeks
 Frequent notation of where they were studying
 Comments about why they chose that place, what they
were doing, etc.
 Longer, weekly summaries using traditional media
 Final reflective piece
 Participants directly tweeted to dedicated account

11. Advantages
 Quick to learn
 Can tweet from anywhere using a variety of input
devices and software
 Records immediate impressions
 Many phones can determine where they are
 Short messages tagged with date stamp – easier for
researcher to code - concise
 Students can review tweets for reflection
 Observers can see raw data

12. Related Services
 TwitPic – share photos on Twitter
 Ethnographic exploration of a location
 TweetStats – graphical visualization of tweet trends
for a user name
 Numerical way to track habits of research participants
 140Kit – a way to do data mining on Twitter users or
search terms
 Bit.ly – shortens long URLs
 So you don’t eat up 140 characters with the link itself

13. Disadvantages
 Twitter not as fine grained in finding location as
some newer services like Foursquare
 Students might want to create a user name just for
the study if they don’t want to mix school with social
content

14. Twitter for Education
 Record short and frequent observations
 For self reflection later
 Documentation of a phenomenon
 Class analysis of field observations or social trends in
their own data
 May include pictures (See TwitPic)
 Use data mining and analysis on public data to teach
concepts
 Class polling
 Class back channel for on task side discussions
 Class discussion outside of class hours
 Office hours or quick questions

15. For further exploration
 Twitter as a learning tool by Rick Reo
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20769928/Rick-Reo-s-
Twitter-Adoption-Assessment-Tool
 “Where Do You Learn?”: Tweeting to Inform Learning
Space Development by Aspden and Thorpe
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE%2BQuarterly
/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/WhereDoYou
LearnTweetingtoInfor/163852