Introduction
While universities now routinely offer and frame educational experiences via the internet, the implementation of online learning is often predicated on, and driven by, the choice of specific types of software, often referred to as Learning Management Systems (LMSs). While increasingly complex in the tools they offer, in general, LMSs attempt to digitally replicate the design and experience of a traditional classroom environment. At first glance, offering an approximation of the classroom would seem the logical approach as it brings familiar notions and expectations, reassuring institutions, educators and learners that whilst online they are still getting a ‘real’ university experience. Indeed, for online learning providers such as Open Universities Australia (OUA), the contributing educational institutions are contractually obligated to ensure that their online units match the on-campus equivalents as closely as possible. To facilitate online learning, lectures are now routinely captured as recorded audio and/or video streams; readings, unit notes, and other learning resources which are delivered via electronic repositories in university libraries; and synchronous tutorial discussions are replaced by asynchronous discussion boards or sometimes synchronous interaction via chatrooms or other real-time discussion tools. However, while LMSs offer a recognizable simulation of many of the formal elements of university education, with its own challenges and differing levels of success (Lane, 2009; Leaver, 2003), the informal learning opportunities are less widely addressed.
While there is considerable debate about the exact definition of informal learning, for the purposes of this chapter, informal learning is used to mean those unplanned interactions, exchanges and connections which broadly contribute to meaningful learning without being explicitly driven by curriculum (Greenhow & Robelia, 2009). These might be conversations between learners in common spaces such as coffee shops, libraries, study groups or even just comments made on the way out of a tutorial room. Informal learning includes the development of social ties, bonds and a sense of community between learners, as well as more learning-centred activities such as mutual support in completing assignments, sharing experiences and resources, dealing with educational policies and procedures. Informal learning is also part of the broader area of student engagement, which emphasises the social and cultural contexts that encourage learning beyond the classroom and curriculum. For on-campus students, a great deal of student engagement and informal learning occurs simply because learners are physically in the same room, without any explicit pedagogical driver. If informal learning opportunities within education are to be similarly available to online learners, then the shift away from shared physical spaces needs to be matched with an increase in potential online interactions which are somehow related to, or spring forth from, formal learning, but are not contained by formal moments or the tool of formal education, the LMS. Given that impetus, this chapter outlines an investigation into the utility of the online service Twitter as a tool for facilitating informal learning by examining its use by two first-year student groups, both taking the unit Web Communications 101; one group in a blended learning mode, which utilized traditional face to face tutorials, while the second version was delivered fully online via OUA.
What is Twitter?
Launched in 2006, and becoming increasingly popular since 2007, Twitter is an online platform which describes itself as “a real -time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting” (Twitter, 2011). Beyond the corporate speak, Twitter is generally regarded as either a micro-blogging tool or a scaled down social networking service. At a basic level, Twitter allows users to create short messages – called tweets – of up to 140 characters in length, shared publicly 1; with the most recent tweet displayed at the top of a user’s Twitter page, hence the micro-blogging description 2. Tweets may contain links, are usually shared publicly, may be directed to another Twitter user (using the ‘@username’ convention to specify a recipient), and may also be sent privately between individuals using a direct message function. Twitter meets the basic definition of a social networking site established by boyd and Ellison (2007) in that it is an online platform which allows users to “(1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (boyd & Ellison, 2007, p. 211). However, the ways individuals use their Twitter accounts tends to determine whether it is more social, more about sharing information, or more task-specific. Given that Twitter as a company emphasises information sharing, this tends to be the way most users conceptualize their use of the tool. Whilst much smaller in terms of users than the social networking giant Facebook, as of July 2011 Twitter still had more than 200 million users, generating over 350 million individual tweets every day. Significantly, in 2010 the US Library of Congress announced that they had formed a partnership with Twitter and would archive all public tweets (Lohr, 2010). While a valuable resource, this partnership also explicitly indicates the presumption that most Twitter activity is public, in comparison with other social networking services which have a higher proportion of content shared with limited numbers of people using privacy controls.
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