Twitter in Chemical Education, and IUPAC

@beardedchemist; D. Brynn Hibbert

doi:10.1515/ci-2015-0303

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Twitter in Chemical Education, and IUPAC

@beardedchemist und D. Brynn Hibbert

Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 15. Mai 2015

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Aus der Zeitschrift Chemistry International Band 37 Heft 3

It is ironic that an article about Twitter, the quintessential social medium, should appear in a glossy print magazine for the benefit of the reading public. One might almost “lol” [1]. But all organisations are coming to grips (with more or less facility), with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the paraphernalia of Web 2.0 [2]. The great movement to ‘open science’ is changing the way we communicate what we do.

On the way to this new millennium, I happened to have the idea that the 140-character messages of Twitter could help me with lectures to my first year chemistry class at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney Australia. The group numbered about 600 and the lectures were given in the largest auditorium on campus. Even with my voice, a microphone was necessary, and it quickly became apparent that no one in my audience was going to put their hand up to ask or answer a question. Hence Twitter. With hashtag #chem1011 (and later #1031) a student could anonymously post a tweet that would appear on a screen (separate from the one I was using for my PowerPoint presentation of the lecture) [3]. The first year of this experiment was 2011, and following another round of use, with a student survey before and after the lectures, we published a short paper in the Journal of Chemical Education in April 2013 [4].

What happened in the first lecture? Nothing. After fifteen minutes there were no tweets at all. I asked the class if anyone could tweet anything, not being sure the system was working. Soon a tweet “When did you grow your beard?”. After that there was a steady, but manageable flow of questions and answers. I asked what was the latest element IUPAC had named (copernicium, element 112), and received the answer “Copernicus”. When I suggested this was nearly correct, as the element had indeed been named after the 16th century astronomer but conventions of naming elements required the -ium ending, a further tweet told me that the correct name was tweeted, but ‘the spell checker changed it’.

Having a stream of tweets to augment a lecture has several advantages beyond the immediate asking and answering of a short question. I encouraged the class to tweet their own answers to the questions before I gave the official word, which allowed some measure of communal learning, and gave me an idea of what they actually knew and understood. Tweets continued after a lecture, and provided a quick way of obtaining short facts. Finally, the novelty of an old, bearded professor using the new social medium was a most strange thing. (One tweet: “Omg, we get to use Twitter,”).

The majority (55%) of tweets were about lecture content, and 1/3 were extraneous (birthday greetings, chemistry jokes, but luckily no malicious or unconscionable material). Full information is in our paper [4]. A summary of the responses from the class after using Twitter is given in Table 1. Interestingly, at the start of the course in 2012, only 23% of the class had Twitter accounts. (Does Australia lag behind the rest of the world?) There was no statistical difference in the responses from existing users of Twitter, new users, or non-users.

Perceived Value to Twitter in Lectures	Prior	New	Non-User	All
Percentage "Yes" Responses	n=54	n=41	n=144	N=239
In general, did you find the tweets useful to your learning?	78%	66%	72%	72%
Did the availability of Twitter make it easier to ask questions?	85%	69%	75%	77%
Did the availability of Twitter make it easier to answer questions?	73%	62%	67%	67%
Did the tweets intrude on the flow of lecture?	63%	74%	63%	66%
Did the tweets increase your engagement with the course?	59%	54%	53%	55%
Did the tweets make the lecture feel more personal for you?	57%	59%	57%	57%
Would you recommend that Twitter be used routinely in large lectures?	67%	74%	70%	70%

Responses were generally positive, although not entirely. Across all respondents, 72% saw Twitter as useful to learning. Among the 72% who rated tweets as useful, 60% of them also found that they were intrusive. Among the 28% who did not rate tweets as useful, 78% found them to be intrusive. Across other items, 70% recommended that Twitter be used routinely in lectures, 77% agreed that it was easier to ask questions, and 67% agreed that it was easier to answer questions. Smaller majorities agreed that tweets increased their engagement in the course (55%) or the personal feel of the lectures (57%).

How useful is social media in teaching, or for communicating the ideas of a learned society such as IUPAC? Many of our colleagues at the older end of the demographic cannot see the point, while those at the other end cannot see why not. Facebook has 1.23 billion monthly active users and there are 500 million tweets sent each day. Perhaps there might be some room for chemistry and IUPAC in there. It took just over one year to approve an IUPAC project “Increasing IUPAC’s Social Media presence” (2013-055-2-024, see this issue page 22), but hopefully the team has started their work early in 2015 and will report progress at the IUPAC General Assembly in Busan. Meanwhile if you see a tweet from @beardedchemist please take note!

Notes and References

1. lol: ‘laugh out loud’ in the shorthand used in such media.Suche in Google Scholar

2. Web 2.0: The second stage of development of the Internet, characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media.Suche in Google Scholar

3. hashtag: On social media sites, the hash, or number sign, is often used to classify content. Messages on twitter ‘tagged’ with #chem1011 could be recognized as relating to the lectures.Suche in Google Scholar

4. M. L. Cole, D. B. Hibbert, E. J. Kehoe. J. Chem. Educ., 90(5): 671–672; http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed3005825Suche in Google Scholar

Online erschienen: 2015-5-15

Erschienen im Druck: 2015-5-1

Artikel in diesem Heft

https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2015-0303