Dr. Tony Karrer is the Founder of TechEmpower and, as of 2019, over the past 22 years, has worked as a Chief Technology Officer, technical consultant or technical advisor. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (Karrer, 2019). In 2009, he posted the following statement on his eLearning Technology blog: “Twitter is not a tool for people who are new to social media and the use of social media for personal learning and work.” (Karrer, 2009).
Given that his statement is more than ten years old, one must keep in mind that there is a whole block of emerging workers that have used Twitter during this time, and one can also presume they are comfortable with it. Despite this, I believe this statement still holds with learners that are new to social media. Twitter is a medium that possesses some advantages for training purposes but falls short of other learning mediums, both from an ease of use perspective and design limitations. Further, when ranked against other social media platforms, Twitter ranked 13th out of 15, in terms of users, with 340 million as compared with Facebook with 3.5 billion and YouTube at 2 billion users (Clement, 2020). Yet another limitation with Twitter is that you can only send direct messages to one user at a time (Pappas, 2017).
A significant benefit of using Twitter as a learning tool is that it is easily accessible using a mobile device, but in this age of technology, the same is true for many training tools. Another advantage of using Twitter is the micro-blogging feature that limits characters to 140, thus facilitating “chunk” learning, which allows learners to receive information in smaller amounts, facilitates it to allowing users to commit the knowledge to memory (“Chunking Strategy,” 2015). However, if the message requires more than 140 characters to be meaningful and inclusive of the entire thought, Twitter is not the tool to use.
While Twitter is used in education, it has been primarily utilized as a communication tool between teachers and learners, specifically in the K-12 environment. (“Online Tools for Teaching & Learning,” 2020) Teachers also use it to provide updates to homework assignments or real-time updates for projects (Tang & Hew, 2017).
To see how important ease of use is to learning, one only needs to look at two other critical business functions that use social media extensively. The Marketing and CRM (Customer Relations Management) functions in corporate America use social media extensively to teach, educate, and engage current and potential customers with their products and services. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review cites what they refer to as a “decision simplicity index,” which measures how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand (or navigate) information about a brand (Freeman, 2014). Brands that scored in the top quarter in their study were 86% more likely to be purchased by the consumers considering them. Another study conducted by Superoffice.com cited surveyed customers as stating that ease of use was the most important element determining whether they use a CRM system or not. (“12 amazing CRM charts you don’t want to miss,” 2019)
I am not new to social media, and I recently began using Twitter. While I have been able to follow tweeters with relative ease, I have had difficulty maneuvering through tweets to get to specific information. Being a new Twitter user, I find myself overwhelmed with the amount of news and “tweets.” If I were required to use this platform today as a learning tool, I suspect I would fail. I can only imagine how someone new to social media would fare.
References
12 amazing CRM charts you don’t want to miss. (2019, December 03). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.superoffice.com/blog/crm-charts/
Chunking strategy. (2015, October 4). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from http://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/thinking/chunking/chunking-as-a-learning-strategy/
Clement, J. (2020, February 14). Global social Media RANKING 2019. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Freeman, P. (2014, August 01). To keep your customers, keep it simple. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple
Karrer, T. (2009, January 21). Twitter as personal learning and work tool. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-as-personal-learning-and-work.html
Karrer, T. (2019). https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonykarrer/. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonykarrer/
Online Tools for Teaching & Learning. (2020). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://blogs.umass.edu/onlinetools/community-centered-tools/twitter/
Pappas, C. (2017, July 20). Using Twitter for ELEARNING: 8 pros and 6 cons to consider. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://elearningindustry.com/using-twitter-for-elearning-8-pros-and-6-cons-to-consider
Tang, Y., & Hew, K. F. (2017). Using Twitter for education: Beneficial or simply a waste of time? Computers & Education, 106, 97-118. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.004
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