New practices in doing academic development: Twitter as an informal learning space

Abstract

Using social media platforms to build informal learning processes and social networks is significant in academic development practices within higher education. We present three vignettes illustrating academic practices occurring on Twitter to show that using social media is beneficial for building networks of academics, locally and globally, enhancing information flows, inspiring thinking, and motivating academic practice. Using a reflective and diffractive methodology, we illuminate how different flows of forces and relations are enacted. We argue it is in this fluidity of informal learning that perspectives are contested and shaped, and that academic developers can benefit by encompassing such practices.

Collaboration, collation, and competition: Crowdsourcing a directory of educational technology tools for teaching and learning

“…It is possible that the positive response to these elements within the crowdsourcing strategy for the current project is related to their growing significance with regard to education in the broader sense. For instance, the use of online platforms for collaboration among teachers with a view to informal learning (Ab Rashid, Yahaya, Rahman, & Yunus, 2016) and the sharing of resources (Ranieri, Manca, & Fini, 2012) has been well established, particularly with regard to Twitter (e.g., McPherson, Budge, & Lemon, 2015), which played an important role in circulating the crowdsourcing call throughout the project and in disseminating the contributions as they were submitted. Likewise, gamification has become a focus of much attention for education in recent times (Dicheva, Dichev, Agre, & Angelova, 2015), particularly with regard to motivation and engagement factors associated with the use of game-based strategies in teaching and learning (van Roy & Zaman, 2018).…”

Secondary School Students and Internet Forums—A Survey of Student Views Contrasted with an Analysis of Internet Forum Posts

“…There are numerous studies on the use of social media for professional opportunities [1,2], experiences, and opinions about them [16][17][18]. There are also studies showing the influence on learning [19][20][21] and on specific loci like Facebook and Twitter [22,23].…”

Exploring higher education professionals’ use of Twitter for learning

“…In recent years online social network sites (SNS) have become hot topics of conversation in professional learning circles (Hart, 2015). Indeed, claims that SNS such as Twitter support informal learning among higher education professionals have gained increasing attention (Beckingham, 2015;McPherson, Budge, & Lemon, 2015).…”