Greenhow, C., & Gleason, B. (2012). Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literacy practice. The Educational Forum, 76(4), 464-478.

The importance of knowing how to properly build a community and engage the public through social media is becoming increasingly more important in todays workplace. Since this is the case, shouldn’t education make strides towards teaching best practices and methods to utilize these tools effectively. Greenhow offers three research questions with respect to twitter specifically.

  1. How do young people use Twitter in formal or informal learning settings, and with what results?

  2. Can tweeting be considered a new literacy practice?

  3. How do literacy practices on Twitter align with traditional literacy practices typically emphasized in standards-based curriculum?

Twitter usage is expanding quickly, especially among teens and young adults. Twitter is great for “finding and conversing with friends and acquaintances, making new contacts, connecting to public fi gures, sharing information, learning about current events, exploring job opportunities, and mobilizing support for issues” (p. 466). Utilizing programs like twitter, users are developing new literacies (twitteracies), or best practices for reading and writing in the context of that particular technology. New literacies involve “which technologies and which forms and functions of literacy most support one’s purposes” (p. 467). The results for each research question are below respectively.

  1. “Twitter use in higher education may facilitate increased student engagement with course content and increased student-to-student or student–instructor interactions; potentially leading to stronger positive relationships that improve learning and to the design of richer experiential or authentic learning experiences” (p. 470).
  2. “They allow young people to perform new social acts not previously possible, and they demonstrate the new ethos that Lankshear and Knobel (2006) describe. Authorship is neither individualistic nor completely original. Remixing is fundamental to how young people create “new” texts (Alvermann 2008)” (p. 471).
  3. “Young people’s tweeting practices may open up opportunities for their development of standard language profi ciencies in several ways: (1) improving students’ motivation and engagement with course content; (2) increasing student–student or student–instructor interactions, which creates more opportunities for feedback and mentoring; and (3) offering lower barriers to publishing and a more “relaxed” writing style, which can encourage self-expression, creativity, playfulness, and risk-taking” (p. 473).

Large scale studies are needed to examine:

-practices among various subgroups to determine commonalities and variations in practice

-connections between twitteracies and in-school learning in other contexts

-how participants view themselves in the twitterverse

-integration of technologies like twitter into secondary schools and higher education

However, social media always has some challenges with regards to k-12 classrooms. Administrators and parents likely will be concerned with using social media due to lack of control with content management and security. Thus research will likely continue with other students until the research suggests that the benefits outweigh the possible costs.

The paper is very well organized, clearly stating the research questions and the literature review style explanations for each. The paper tackles each question in order and gives numerous citations as support for the conclusions that the authors are making. There are no statistics or data sets required in this paper. The authors simply present ideas regarding twitteracy and support their suppositions with many current research theories and studies.

I really like the design of the article and the methods that they used to deliver their ideas to the educational community. I also think that this topic is very important for the upcoming decade of new jobs. Those that are skilled with these social media technologies will be at a major advantage with job acquisition and development. The current President is a great example of how powerful social media like twitter can be in our current world and will only increase as the technologies grow and expand.

 

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