Shock news: Most faculty don’t use Twitter …
Image source: scienceroll.com
There was a piece in Campus Technology recently that revealed the ‘shocking truth’ that the majority of higher education faculty do not use Twitter. A survey of 1,958 higher education professionals conducted by Faculty Focus in July and August of this year recorded that 69.3 percent of respondents do not use Twitter in any capacity, and 56.4 percent have not tried it at all. Some of the reasons advanced by faculty members for not using Twitter included lack of relevance to education, the danger that microblogging might contribute to poor writing skills, that they don’t understand how to use it, or that they simply don’t have the time for it.
I’m sure a survey focusing on the usage of PowerPoint in the mid-1990s would have generated a broadly similar response. The fact is, notwithstanding the huge growth in twitterers, we are still very much in the innovator/early adoption stage in the technology adoption lifecycle as far as the educational applications of Twitter are concerned. Personally, I was on Twitter for six months without really knowing why and I was quite comfortable about this because it only by immersing yourself in these technologies that you come to appreciate their usefulness (or lack thereof). The twitterisation process has some way to go in the education sector yet and, as someone who is typically an early adopter, I am still very much in the experimentation phase.
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