Microblogging in Higher Education

Abstract

Microblogging, with applications in many domains, including education, is one of the social media technologies with the greatest potential. The features of a microblogging platform vary from sending and receiving messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, and by third party applications. Even though social media networking sites are commonly used in Higher Education, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement, albeit some studies on the use of Twitter as a microblogging tool in educational settings Fei Gao, Tian Luo and Ke Zhang (2012). In this study, the authors analyse the level of familiarity, engagement and frequency of use of social media technologies among university-level computer science students in Finland. Additionally, the authors analyse the experience of using a specific microblogging social media, Edmodo, as a learning aid to support group work. The specific focus of the study is to examine the reception of the students towards the Edmodo platform. The data was collected through a social media familiarity questionnaire, Edmodo experience questionnaire and interviews. The main findings are that the cohort was not very familiar with social media at the beginning of the course. However, the use of the Edmodo as a microblogging social media networking sites, as a learning tool had a positive impact on the students. This study provides experimental evidence that microblogging social networking sites and more specifically Edmodo can be used as an educational tool to help engage students more in the use of more social media networking sites.

A Case Study of Using Edmodo to Enhance Computer Science Learning for Engineering Students

“…The use of social media in learning facilitates the achievement of learning objectives and helps students to get better results [5]. Social media gain more and more popularity in the learning area, but one of them which is particularly accepted by students is Edmodo [6], [7].…”

How can students-as-partners work inform assessment?

“…For this to happen it is essential to foster the student educator relationship, transparent expectations, a common understanding of the assessment and expected feedback, and student learning preferences to tailor materials and delivery methods and to enhance the overall learning and teaching experiences. It is worth mentioning that student-staff partnership and assessment have improved my teaching and research and has highlighted the students' intention to broaden the use of social media as a teaching and learning tool for collaborative learning (Oyelere et al, 2016;Paliktzoglou & Suhonen, 2014b, 2014a, 2015.…”

Benchmarking for Practical Training in Computational Fluid Dynamics

“…(Parra, 2014b) uses the Moodle platform that is open source but needs the support of a team of informatics devoted to the proper configuration. Other option is Edmondo (Paliktzoglou 2014). This is private software but is offered for free and it requests no configuration at all.…”