Although there are many definitions of student engagement, we see it as the time and energy students devote to educationally purposeful activities and the extent to which the university encourages students to participate in activities that lead to their academic success.
With Twitter, as with all social-networking tools, the value of the experience hinges on three things: (1) who you are connected to and with; (2) how frequently you participate; and (3) how conscientious you are about contributing value to the community. Therefore, to establish relevance and to make sure students got off to a good start, we took the following steps:
"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."
Most important from your Twitter stream
The Tweeted Times aggregates news in your Twitter stream and ranks them by popularity among your friends. Never loose any important news!
Is your marketing campaign on twitter wearing off? Our latest Twitter software technology is designed to help you raise your sales by 30% in just 14 days or less!
See your tweets dissected by topic. Here's my twylah page for my Twitter account. You can see common topics and it is organized nicely. I set this up sometime back.
Unfollowers.me lets you see who has unfollowed you on twitter. We use optional email or tweet notifications to notify you if someone has unfollowed you.
PlugThe.Net will detect the endpoints of URLs in Tweets. So the plugin will show the title, the description and (if offered) the open graph image of the linked website.
Tweagle is a sleek Twitter client combining the best of Twitter and Foursquare. With Tweagle, users can listen to the voice of the city and easily share their location via Foursquare, checking in and tweeting at the same time.
Easy Twitter Filtering
TweetDig is the smarter way to filter Tweets, so you can prioritize what you read. It's time to hide the Twitter 'noise' and de-clutter your timeline.
Streamie is a full realtime Twitter client that runs in your web browser.
New tweets will appear in your timeline immediately when someone posts them to Twitter.
To include more, we'll limit each one to the Twitter capacity of 140 characters. We're looking for insights on how social media has changed business, media, technology, life, not necessarily in that order. Anyone who wants can either leave 140-character comments here, or Twitter them addressed to @stevebaker