Twittermania: Understanding How Social Media Technologies Impact Engagement and Academic Performance of a New Generation of Learners

Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, is increasingly evolving from being a mere chatting platform to a tool that is instrumental in affecting a desired learning and social change among individuals and organizations. Although using Twitter for learning while socializing represents a significant departure from its intended initial function, information systems (IS) researchers should further explore the impact and implications of social media technologies such as Twitter in the educational context. We draws on engagement theory and social impact theory to assess how social media technologies tools can support learning and improve students’ academic outcomes. We present an experiment in which we compared Twitter and a traditional discussion board to academically engage students over a 14-week period. The results show that actively using both Twitter and traditional discussion boards for engagement is related to student performance in the course. Social network analysis suggests that, by using Twitter, the students possibly created shared mental models that led them to engage with the class more, and therefore, better their performance.

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