Speaker: Ying Tang, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong
Time: 14:00-17:00
Venue: Room 802, Meng Wah Complex, HKU

Abstract:

Twitter is a popular microblogging social network site. Despite the fact that it is now one of the most popular technological tools, its educational value is less clear. In this presentation, we reviewed 50 empirical studies on Twitter use in education from 2006 to 2015. By analyzing the benefits and drawbacks, we strived to understand whether using Twitter would benefit students or not. We displayed our findings in four major categories: (a) the profile of studies; (b) ways of Twitter use in education; (c) impacts in interactions and (d) impacts in students’ learning outcomes. The findings reveal that Twitter was mainly used for communication and assessment purposes, and it did show potentials of improving students learning outcomes. We also identified some challenges in previous studies and proposed several designing principles of using Twitter in educational contexts.