Ways to use Twitter in Academia

Last week, I started some discussions on the use of Twitter amongst Higher Ed Developers. While the benefits of extra communication channels and the ability to follow other industry experts and innovators is powerful, Twitter has yet to be seriously explored as a medium for recruitment and retention. If such a exploration is embarked upon, I'm sure it will start at the student level which will then trickle to new opportunities.

In order to start at the student level, students must be using Twitter. Academhack has a review of findings from a classroom Twitter assignment. Through the assignment, Dave (the author of Academhack) found that Twitter expanded the classroom community, merged classroom conversations with outside of class conversations, increased students' awareness of world activities, and helped to provide instantaneous feedback.

This was a great experiment with awesome results. It appears as though the engagement factor for the class was extremely high, something that all professors should strive for. I would be interested to get a student's take and to see if he/she still uses Twitter. Nonetheless, steps are being taken to use Twitter in the academic world.

I'm not sure how this will trickle to recruitment yet, but I'm confident it will. To get an idea, I have started to track how many times the name (and abbreviation) of my University appears in a tweet. I'm not sure what to expect to learn, if anything at all, but it seems like a good place to get started. I'll keep you posted.