Twitter and Teaching: to Tweet or not to Tweet?

Abstract

. As increasingly more new skills are necessary for graduates entering the workplace or seeking employment, business leaders, politicians and educators suggest that if students are to succeed in today’s world, they will require 21st century skills. However, there is no single agreed-upon set of skills. We argue that social media skills are becoming ever more important for employment and society should class them as important 21st-century skills from maintaining well-rounded social media profiles to more advanced data science and analytic skills. At the same time, such a demand affects the teaching process since teachers have to acquire new knowledge about the available tools. Twitter as a microblogging platform is definitely one of the tools that is a part of 21st-century social skills. Thus, by integrating it into the teaching process, Twitter can generate new experiences for both sides, the students and the teachers. In this paper, we conduct a descriptive review of the recent literature that covers Twitter use in teaching. We reviewed results from the top 100 retrieved research results in Web of Science on Twitter and teaching in the domains of social science, science technology, and arts and humanities. We analysed the results quantitatively in terms of content, methods, and methodologies and qualitatively as the description of results found in selected papers that meet certain criteria. This paper also discusses different research departure points for use in further research of the topic