Twitter for Academic Purposes (TAP)

EAP and social media

New Year, new term, new students, new teaching practices. The aims and learning outcomes are the same, though, and I’m going to test the relative affordances of using twitter for academic purposes to achieve these with my new student cohort, starting on Monday.

I would really welcome your thoughts and suggestions as I do this. I plan to share how my term goes as far as TAP is concerned and will acknowledge any contributions accordingly.

So far, I’ve come up with the following list of affordances based on the teaching and learning aims of my context, and loosely based on the need to ensure that we address written communication both in terms of the skills it requires and the social practice it is.

Twitter affords:

  • brevity (i.e good for selective and purposeful summaries)
  • speed and conciseness of expression (rather than foregrounding accuracy)
  • clarity (in relation to audience awareness)
  • the expression of stance (building an academic identity)
  • brainstorming, including the sharing of resources for a project
  • collaborative work (building a learning community of practice)
  • creativity (in terms of multimodality, e.g. complementing a tweet with an image or video)
here i come!
Academia here I come!

TAP references:

http://bit.ly/1aKiVaX

http://bit.ly/1sgVdvs

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