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My name is Dr. Erin Whitteck and I teach a large chem 102 lecture, three hundred-plus freshmen.
And as you can imagine as a freshman sitting in this audience, it's very intimidating to ask
questions.
so our objective was to create some sort of channel for students to ask questions in a
le% less intimidating way.
What we decided to do was employ the use of Twitter.
We figured that Twitter
%uh is should be very familiar to students of this age
and also would be very easy for students to post questions to Twitter
during class either by using their smartphones
%uh via text messaging or their laptops.
So the experiment that we devised
was to provide students with the hash tag and students could post questions via this
hash tag,
and I could either answer these questions during class
while they're responding to any clicker questions I asked during lecture or I could post
discussion on the discussion boards
using the learning management system that we use in this class, which was Blackboard
Vista.
We created a help document for this experiment and posted it in the course web site,
and to our delight a couple of students found it and began following the instructor
in Twitter, even before the announcement was made in class.
Then a couple of students posted %uh
tweets with our hash tag in it, but they didn't have any content in them. I guess it
was just an experiment on their part to see what would actually happen.
And then
nothing happened.
Although the instructor posted the hash tag on the
blackboard
for two weeks after making the announcement in class,
no one tweeted during the lectures or after the lectures
or anything about
%uh chem 102b spring '10
%um at all.
And %uh we wanted to kind of figure out
what went wrong with our experiment,
so we decided to include
three Twitter-related questions
on the end-of-semester survey.
What we learned from the Twitter portion of the survey was that far fewer students actually use Twitter
than we had expected.
This related directly to the main reasons they didn't use the Twitter hash tag for class,
especially because eighty one percent said they didn't have a Twitter account and didn't want to
create one.
Nevertheless only seven percent of the students reported not having any questions to ask during
lectures,
which leads us to believe that having a way to ask questions during lectures is still a good
goal to have.
That, coupled with the fact that fifty eight percent report often sending and receiving text
messages during class and yet not finding that distracting,
leads us to believe that starting early in the semester, providing sufficient instruction
in class, and better examples would make having a Twitter hash tag still a promising approach to
help students get more of the lectures.