Should universities lead or follow technological trends?
The Australian's Higher Education section this week either presented some very strange research, or made a very strange presentation of some research, in claiming that Twitter is the least used online resource (18 February 2015, p. 30). (Less used than www.nps.id.au, are you sure? I laughed.) The article doesn't clearly identify the study alleged to have discovered this and I wasn't able to find it via a search engine, so I can only go by the article's presentation here.
As the article has it, Twitter is "the social media platform of choice for academics, journalists and a host of other professionals" but "barely rates as an educational tool". This is based on a survey showing that only 15% of participating students found Twitter useful in their university studies.
To my mind, the most obvious explanation for this is that Twitter just doesn't meet the needs of university education. As far as I know, it was never designed for this purpose, so it's hardly surprising that people don't use it as such. Refrigerators, say, probably get even less use in university courses and no one would anyone expect anything else given that refrigerators were never designed for educating people.
The article instead quotes the study's lead author, Neil Selwyn, speculating that the finding "could be seen as a negative for universities [since Twitter] is where the technological generations are having conversations and finding stuff out." The underlying assumption seems be to that the Cool Kids are using Twitter, and universities might not be cool if they don't use it too.
Well, students probably use refrigerators quite a bit too, but does that mean that it would be useful to have one in my classroom? If Twitter is to be accepted as an educational tool, educators need to be convinced of some educational purpose in using it. Those who do things in order to be cool are more likely to be described as "try-hards" than "innovators".
And are the Cool Kids really using Twitter anyway? According to the article, nearly all students are actually using learning management systems, on-line libraries and on-line videos — and why wouldn't they, given that all these tools have well-established educational uses? The article itself acknowledges that the students are all aware of Twitter, they just don't use it for this particular purpose. Maybe the article could just as meaningfully have read "Twitter barely rates as an educational tool, yet is the social media platform of choice for academics, journalists and a host of other professionals."
