#Beyond140: Helping Pre-Service Teachers Construct a Community of Inquiry on Twitter

 

ABSTRACT

The development of socio-interactive web technologies such as social media necessitates the exploration of how they can be effectively appropriated and implemented in educational contexts. In an effort to respond the need, the present study examines the use of a synchronous multimodal tool in higher education context. By applying the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) on Twitter, the study investigates the social and teaching presence elements of the CoI and pre-service language teachers’ perspectives pertaining to the integration of a microblogging tool into a college-level course. For this purpose, the participants and the instructor’s tweets posted during the course were collected, and students’ opinions regarding the implementation of Twitter were gathered through a survey. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data revealed that the participation of pre-service language teachers and the instructor highly indicated social and teaching presences, respectively. It was also documented that students who took the designed hybrid course often reported positive experience in regards to the implementation of Twitter, including a perceived increase in social network literacies. Informed by the scholarship, the results of the study illustrated that social networking sites could provide spaces to establish and maintain a participatory community of inquiry in post-secondary settings.