Twitter in education: searching in and with digital social networks

Abstract

This article is part of the research on Digital Social Networks in Education conducted by GPDOC - Teaching and Cyberculture Research Group, of the Graduate Program in Education (PROPED) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro - UERJ. The purpose of this paper is to present a contribution to the theme Social Networks in Education, with the object of study Twitter, a microblogging software that has been structuring social and learning networks on the Internet. In this paper, we present Twitter not only as social software, but also as a fruitful field of research and training. For this, we opted for the multi-reference approach (ARDOINO, 1998) withimmersion in the interface, taking as data the tweets published by some of the most important researchers in the area of Cyberculture, in October/November 2010. To analyze them, the researchers performed an interpretative reading of the messages, in order to understand meanings and recurrences, which constituted the subsuming notions, presented here as representative categories of such uses (MACEDO, 2008). They are: the use of Twitter for communication between geographically dispersed subjects, the use to make public the reports of daily life, the use as an information filter and the use for discussion on specific topics. From these uses, we understand that Twitter can structure processes of collaborative construction of knowledge through some communicational potentialities of the interface, among which we can mention: multidirectional communication, information sharing and community building.