Exploring Engineering Students’ College Experiences Using Social Media Monitoring Tool Radian6

Students nowadays talk about their college life in various online social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and many blogs and forums. Public discourse on these social media sites can provide insights into students’ college experiences. This paper focuses on exploring the informal social media data created by students in their daily life, rather than investigating the formal usage of social media platforms in the classroom settings. Many social media monitoring tools are developed for monitoring business brands or public events. These tools may also be used to collect social media data for educational research and policy recommendation purposes. This study uses social media monitoring tool Radian6 to collect data from Twitter about engineering students’ college experiences. The data are analyzed both in Radian6 and manually using qualitative content analysis. The results shed light into the academic context and social context of engineering students’ learning experiences. This exploratory study also considers the potential of social media analytics tools for engineering education research. Social media analytics tools specifically for educational purposes need to be developed in the future.

[1]  Debbie Chachra,et al.  AC 2008-960: BEING AND BECOMING: GENDER AND IDENTITY FORMATION OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS , 2008 .

[2]  L. Leifer,et al.  Enabling Engineering Student Success: The Final Report for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education. CAEE-TR-10-02. , 2010 .

[3]  Reed Stevens,et al.  Academic pathways study: Processes and realities , 2008 .

[4]  R. Weber.  Basic Content Analysis , 1986 .

[5]  Lorraine Fleming,et al.  Persistence In Engineering Education: Experiences Of First Year Students At A Historically Black University , 2005 .

[6]  Devin Gaffney.  #iranElection: quantifying online activism , 2010 .

[7]  B. Berg.  Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences , 1989 .

[8]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[9]  N. Augustine.  Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future , 2006 .

[10]  Jorge Pomares,et al.  Experiences with Virtual Environment and Remote Laboratory for Teaching and Learning Robotics at the University of Alicante , 2006 .

[11]  David L. Amsbury,et al.  Detrital dolomite in central Texas , 1962 .

[12]  Mark Warschauer,et al.  Civil Engineering Education in a Visualization Environment: Experiences with VizClass , 2006 .

[13]  Ruth A. Streveler,et al.  Engineering School, Life Balance, And The Student Experience , 2006 .

[14]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Twitinfo: aggregating and visualizing microblogs for event exploration , 2011, CHI.

[15]  Sandra Courter,et al.  From the Students' Point of View: Experiences in a Freshman Engineering Design Course , 1998 .

[16]  Aaron Smith,et al.  Social Media & Mobile Internet Use among Teens and Young Adults. Millennials. , 2010 .

[17]  Barbara M. Olds,et al.  I’m Graduating This Year! So What Is An Engineer Anyway? , 2009 .

[18]  Kimberly A. Neuendorf,et al.  The Content Analysis Guidebook , 2001 .

[19]  Erika Pearson,et al.  All the World Wide Web's a Stage: The Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks , 2009, First Monday.

[20]  Joe Garofalo,et al.  Connecting Informal and Formal Learning Experiences in the Age of Participatory Media , 2008 .

[21]  James E. Groccia,et al.  A Comparative Assessment of Students' Experiences in Two Instructional Formats of an Introductory Materials Science Course , 1997 .

[22]  Yutaka Matsuo,et al.  Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors , 2010, WWW '10.