“I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based
careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail
succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in
tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s
conversation." (Selsberg, 2011)
Twitter Lesson: Part 2
In the last CALL-IS newsletter I wrote about a Twitter photo
scavenger hunt, the purpose of which was to familiarize students with
Twitter so that they could later use it for research. This article is
about a lesson designed to provide some scaffolding for students the
first time they use Twitter for research purposes. As with the last
article, this lesson was tested out with my two first-year writing
international student sections at the University of Arizona during the
Spring 2014 semester. It is important to note that this was part of the
first-year writing program at the university, not the intensive English
program that some international students attend before they are admitted
to a university. Thus, it is strongly suggested that students be at
least at an intermediate level of English proficiency, especially in
reading and writing, before using a Twitter lesson such as this.
Long-Term Goal
I plan my lessons backward, always thinking of the end learning
objective in mind. For this Twitter lesson, the learning outcome was to
connect students with the authors/researchers that they already found,
via Twitter, to gain access to more current information for their
research papers.
After deciding on the learning outcome, I plan the other steps
of the lesson, from the last step to the first, and add enough
scaffolding so that students are challenged to use their critical
thinking skills but not so much that it is an unachievable task. Thus,
the self-paced Twitter worksheet that this lesson revolves around is
broken up into two parts. If you would like to see the worksheet, click
this link.
The first part is where students search Twitter for any tweets about
authors they have already found in their traditional research projects.
This step uses the Twitter skills that they developed in previous
Twitter reading tasks, adding the research component. The second part is
where they search for Twitter accounts of their authors. When an
account is located, they use their skimming/scanning skills to locate
academic articles related to their research topic. Since they already
found articles from these authors in their traditional research, their
Twitter research goal is to find more current research from these same
authors. For example, if they used Academic Search Complete and found an
article from 2009 on brain tumors related to cell phone usage by Dr.
Philip Sutter, then they would search Twitter for Dr. Sutter's articles
on this topic that are from 2010 to 2014.
One particular research moment was the inspiration for bridging
the gap between how I researched using social media for my classes and
how I taught students how to do so. I was working on a research paper on
using cloud programs for L2 writing and found the article “Teaching
Writing in the Cloud” by Dr. Marohang Limbu (2012). I often search
Twitter for authors that write about CALL because I like to thank them
for their inspirational work and to make a longer term connection for my
teaching professional development. Figure 1 shows what I said to Dr.
Limbu.
FIGURE 1: Connect to Dr. Limbu via Twitter (click to enlarge)

However, the conversation did not stop there, as it had in the
past. Instead, I was able to ask him if he had written any articles on
Google Docs and more. The Twitter conversation can be seen in Figure 2.
Being able to interact with the author and get current information from
him, such as the article in the last frame, breathed life into the
research paper I was working on. It reminded me that there were people
behind the theories and practices that I was writing about. This
personal connection via Twitter reminded me how powerful tools such as
Twitter could be, and my motivation for exposing students to this
resource grew even stronger.
FIGURE 2: Twitter conversation with Dr. Limbu via Twitter (click to enlarge)

Why Twitter?
One of the academics I follow on Twitter, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega
(2014), who is an assistant professor in the Public Administration
Division of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, in Mexico,
wrote a blog post titled “Five Ways in Which Twitter Can Be Useful in
Academic Contexts.” In this post he lists:
1. To consume current knowledge in a timely fashion
2. To build scholarly networks
3. To refine research ideas
4. To obtain and provide emotional support
5. To share resources in an environment of scarcity
Many of these are reasons why I started to use Twitter in my
own academic research as well as why I became motivated to teach my own
composition students how to utilize this social media tool.
Specifically, this Twitter lesson focuses on #1 in Pacheco-Vega's list:
“to consume current knowledge in a timely fashion”; however, the other
advantages are no less important. In fact, Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, a
teacher and avid educational blogger, has made an infographic aligning
Twitter skills with Bloom’s Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Skills,
connecting basic skills such as memorization to higher critical thinking
skills of creating and analyzing (available from Kharbach, 2014). This
infographic clearly shows that using Twitter in an academic setting,
frequently nonetheless, can greatly help students build these critical
thinking skills, all the while by using a current technology that
indoctrinates them into a wider sociocultural community that they can be
a part of for as long as the technology platform remains
active.
Overview
The purpose of this lesson was to help students use Twitter as a
research tool by focusing on authors of academic articles they already
found using more traditional sources such as academic databases (e.g.,
EBSCO), academic journals, or even Google Scholar. Of course, using
keywords is an additional way that Twitter can be used for research
purposes, but using authors that the students already found was done in
hopes of increasing their likelihood of finding tweets and ultimately
links to articles. Adding Twitter to the research skills taught in a
first-year composition course after teaching traditional research
methods was done intentionally, as a scaffolding step. Learning is,
after all, repetition, and researching the same authors from their
traditional research with this social media research was done so that
students would have some familiarity from previous lessons while they
explored using Twitter in a new way. Students are savvy using social
media for many purposes, but just as academic English itself is a
learned skill, so is using Twitter for academic purposes such as
researching for academic articles.
This was the first semester that I was able to use Twitter in a
second language classroom setting. The advantages of doing so far
outweighed any disadvantages. There were linguistic benefits as well as
cultural ones. Everything that is done while teaching or learning a
language affects the student’s ability to do so. Thus, by acclimating
students to a widely used form of social media in English (one of the
main languages used in the platform), I was hoping to add a personal,
human, interactive component to what might be considered a traditionally
isolating academic activity: research. If students are able to
incorporate these research skills in a communicative manner such as
social media, perhaps this would also make the transition to
professional events such as conferences or even job interviews a
smoother one.
References
Kharbach, M. (2014, March 5). Twitter aligned with
Blooms' taxonomy: A must have poster for your class. Retrieved
from http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/03/twitter-aligned-with-blooms-taxonomy.html?m=1
Limbu, M. (2012). Teaching writing in the cloud: Networked
writing communities in the culturally and linguistically diverse
classrooms. Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and
Emerging Pedagogies, 1(1), 1–20.
Pacheco-Vega, R. (2014, May 14). Five ways in which
Twitter can be useful in academic contexts. Retrieved from http://www.raulpacheco.org/2014/05/five-ways-in-which-twitter-can-be-useful-in-academic-contexts
Selsberg, A. (2011, March 20). Teaching to the text message. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
Stephanie Fuccio spent 8 years teaching EFL overseas
before returning to the United States to work on an MA TESOL. She
completed this degree in May 2014 and will start teaching composition
courses at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in September 2014. Her
TESOL interests include CALL, MALL, L2 writing, and EAP. She welcomes
feedback at
LinkedIn or
Twitter. |