MSU study: Tweeting a 'new literary practice'

Twitter is emerging as classroom learning tool, a new study says.

In six years, Twitter has evolved from social networking phenomenon to an online classroom of sorts for students, according to a new Michigan State University study.

"Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice," Christine Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at MSU who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers, said in a release Wednesday. "It's changing the way we experience what we read and what we write."

In "Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice," which appears in the research journal Educational Forum, Greenhow notes that Twitter use among U.S. teens has doubled in less than two years. The study estimates there are now some 200 million active users posting more than 175 million tweets daily.

Teaching a college class that focuses on Twitter, created in 2006, showed Greenhow that her students participate more through the site than they do in a face-to-face class setting.

"The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real, that it's not just learning for the sake of learning," she said. "It feels authentic to them."

Greenhow also found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction have higher grades and are more engaged with the course content as well as with the teacher and other students.

Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

Greenhow found that Twitter's real-time design allowed students and instructors to share, collaborate, brainstorm and create projects. Twitter, created in 2006, comes with its own set of rules, such as using hash tags, URL shorteners and leaving enough characters blank to allow retweets. Magazines, newspapers and TV shows run Twitter content, encouraging readers and viewers to engage in the conversation online.

"One of the ways we judge whether something is a new literary form or a new form of communication is whether it makes new social acts possible that weren't possible before," Greenhow said. "Has Twitter changed social practices and the way we communicate? I would say it has."

Greenhow's research follows another MSU study about changing communication practices among college students. That study, led by Jeff Grabill, found that first-year college students value texting more than any other writing style.