Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty

August 28, 2009

To Tweet or not to Tweet, that is the question.

Results are in from the survey conducted by Faculty Focus on Twitter usage and trends among college faculty, and we’d like to first thank everyone who participated. The survey of approximately 2,000 higher education professionals found that nearly one-third (30.7 percent) of the respondents say they use Twitter in some capacity. More than half, (56.4 percent) say they’ve never used Twitter.

This new 20-page report provides a breakdown of the survey results by question, including comments provided by survey respondents. The comments further explain how they are using Twitter, why they stopped, or why they have no interest in using it at all.

Key findings of Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty include:

  • 71.8 percent of current Twitterers expect their usage to increase this school year.
  • 20.6 percent of current non-Twitter users say there is a “50/50 chance” they will use Twitter as a learning tool in the classroom in the next two years.
  • 12.9 percent of respondents say they tried Twitter, but stopped using it because it took too much time, they did not find it valuable, or a combination of reasons.

[Source: Faculty Focus]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer

Teens Dont Tweet, Study Says

August 12, 2009

New numbers suggest Twitter’s growth is not driven by people under 25.

[Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer

The hidden problem with Twitter

July 24, 2009

Oxford University Press has been studying the language of Twitter these past six months – take a look at what they’ve found.

[Source:HigherEdMorning]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer

Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security of Web Tools – NYTimes.com

July 17, 2009

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and BRAD STONE

Published: July 15, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — You might think your password protects the confidential information stored on Web sites. But as Twitter executives discovered, that is a dangerous assumption.

The Web was abuzz Wednesday after it was revealed that a hacker had exposed corporate information about Twitter after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. The breach raised red flags for individuals as well as businesses about the passwords used to secure information they store on the Web.

On Web sites containing personal information like e-mail, financial data or documents, there is usually just a user name and password for protection. More individuals are storing information on Web servers, where it is accessible from any online computer through services offered by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, social networks like Facebook or back-up services like Mozy.

But password-protected sites are growing more vulnerable because to keep up with the growing number of passwords, people use the same simple ones on numerous sites across the Web. In a study last year, Sophos, a security firm, found that 40 percent of Internet users use the same password for every Web site they access.

via Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security of Web Tools – NYTimes.com.

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Posted by Teb Locke

loose wire blog: The Gap in Michael Jacksons Online Death

July 1, 2009

Interesting post on the Loose Wire blog about how the game has changed for traditional media because so many amateurs and semi-amateurs are also playing now.

Michael Jackson is dead. You’ve probably heard that already. But where did you hear it?

Chances are you read about it on twitter. Or more or less anywhere except for the traditional media channels, unless you’re late riser and live in Asia.

Jackson’s death, more than any other news event since 9/11, has captivated the world. Everyone knows who he is/was, and everyone is affected, to some degree, by his death.

But his passing is as likely to be remembered for the manner of its telling as for anything else. Jackson’s death was an online death—at the heart of the West Coast, at the heart of the Internet.

Via Loose Wire blog, The Gap in Michael Jackson’s Online Death

http://www.loosewireblog.com/2009/06/the-gap-in-michael-jacksons-online-death.html

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Posted by Teb Locke

Making history on Twitter

June 24, 2009

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). This is the first talk from TED@State, produced in cooperation with the US State Department.

Watch this talk…

[Source: TED]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer

Twitter Film Festival Goes Live at Duke

April 17, 2009

About 30 students at Duke University spent a recent weekend watching YouTube clips and Twittering about them.

That may sound like any other campus weekend in these high-tech times, but the hours of tweeting and YouTubing were actually part of the “First Ever Twitter Film Festival,” organized by Duke students taking an introductory film class. After embedding short YouTube clips from 39 movies on a blog and creating a shared Twitter account (twitfilm), the students spent April 4 tweeting their thoughts as different sets of clips were screened every hour. A roundtable Twitter discussion followed the next day.

“Narrative enhanced by visual: Bateman’s projected model existence vs. the dark creature within,” read a tweet about a clip from American Psycho.

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer

10 High Fliers on Twitter

April 10, 2009

On the microblogging service, professors and administrators find work tips and new ways to monitor the world.

Twitter is quickly becoming a global faculty lounge. Sure, it’s easy to waste a lot of time on the Internet-based microblogging service reading mundane details about people’s days. But you can also pick up some great higher-education gossip, track down colleagues to collaborate with, or get advice on how to improve your teaching or research.

[Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Posted by Oscar Retterer