Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

All of a Twitter

All of a Twitter

As JISC’s regional support centre in the south east launches new advice for using Twitter in education, Rob Buckley reviews some Twitter apps that can help.

Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages

To some, it’s a tool for people with too much time on their hands. Its users talk about the trivial and irrelevant or follow celebrities to find out what they had for lunch. But Twitter is a great tool for researchers, students and their teachers to spread information, express opinions and communicate, either with individuals or with groups – it’s texting that anyone can easily send and receive and there’s no need to find out personal phone numbers or emails to remind students about coursework deadlines for example. The quickfire updates mean Twitter’s also a good way to keep track of a changing situation, like reaction to a lecture or the news; during the Iranian election scandals, for example, it was the best method for finding out what was going on.

All that Twitter data can be a very valuable asset, potentially giving researchers a way to understand how people feel about particular issues or what issues they find important. As a result, there are now numerous tools to analyse, visualise and present Twitter information, as well as to use Twitter in projects.

Twitterfall, Tweetgrid and Monitter provide simple ways to watch Twitter information in real-time, with searches for particular information streaming down your web browser’s window as new, relevant ‘Tweets’ are located. Despite its ugly interface, Twitterfall is probably the best of the bunch, since it has some excellent filtering systems to restrict which Tweets it will report on: if you want to, you can filter by location, Twitter lists, or by particular words.

All that Twitter data can be a very valuable asset, potentially giving researchers a way to understand how people feel about particular issues or what issues they find important.

Being able to see what people in a particular geographic area are talking about can be very useful for informal research or to track trends and TrendsMap lets you view a map of any part of the world to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about. Trendsmap displays the most popular keywords in Tweets, the size of each word showing you how popular it is. Since the map of topics updates in real-time, it’s possible to watch trends emerge in particular areas.

While attractive, Trendsmap doesn’t lend itself easily to analysis, so tools such as Twitter Sentiment, Twitter StreamGraphs, Trendrr and Twitscoop are invaluable for deeper analysis.

If you want to restrict your research to specific groups of people, WeFollow is an excellent directory system that allows Twitter users to classify themselves into particular subject areas. While it doesn’t include everyone, if you want to find experts tweeting online, WeFollow is an excellent place to start.

The ephemeral nature of Twitter data means that you might want to store it for later use before it disappears. Twapper Keeper enables you to create archives of Tweets related to particular keywords, ‘hashtags’ (words preceded by #] let users flag their Tweet as being related to a particular concept or users. These archives can then be exported as text files for use in programs like Excel.

As well as passively mining Twitter for data, you can also use it to actively acquire data with polls among classes or perhaps an informal research group. There are several polling tools available that use Twitter, such as twitballot, twittervote and PollDaddy, that allow you to create surveys that can be answered using Twitter, with PollDaddy being the most reliable and offering the most features.

But Twitter doesn’t just have to be for offline research. You can also use it as an interaction tool with your class, using SAP Web 2.0’s free PowerPoint Twitter Tools. These allow you to see and react to tweets in real-time: embed the feedback slide in your PowerPoint presentation to display Tweets and comments from audience members – TidyTweet can filter inappropriate language – or use the real-time voting slide to poll the audience for answers to questions.

Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages

Interested in commissioning a similar article? Please contact me to discuss details. Alternatively, return to the main gallery or search for another article: