Cognitive communication 2.0 in higher education: to tweet or not to tweet?

• Autor(a) principal: Andrade, António
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Castro, Cornélia, Ferreira, Sérgio André
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/14515
• topic: Classroom; Cognitive communication; Learning; Micro blogging; Twitter; Web 2.0

Research has been fertile in producing studies on pedagogical change and innovation through technology in Higher Education Institutions, namely the integration of the social media in pedagogical practice. However, there is a lack of studies on the integration of the social media in the particular field of lectures. In this context, commonly practiced, the teacher faces a wide audience and feels the need to activate mechanisms of direct instruction, for reasons of economy of time and because it is the most dominant pedagogical model. As a result there is a communication paradigm 1.0 (one-way communication, one-to-many, low or non-existent interaction). In this study, exploratory and quantitative in nature, an approach to the thematic of the exploration of the social media in order to upgrade the cognitive communication from 1.0 to 2.0 (many-to-many, interaction between all the participants) in lectures was made. On the approach to the problem, we explored a PowerPoint presentation with the integration of the micro blogging tool Twitter, as a basis for addressing the characteristics of cognitive communication 2.0. For data collection a questionnaire was designed, based on literature, and intended to evaluate several dimensions of the resource used, namely: i) pedagogical issues, ii) technological aspects, iii) cognitive learning; iv) interactions in the classroom; v) positive behavior in the classroom and vi) negative behaviour in the classroom. The results indicate that students recognize the potential of this tool in the dimensions assessed. Twitter integration in PowerPoint allowed the teacher and the students to read each other’s views and each had the opportunity to contribute to the debate. It also allowed the release of multiple choice questions to the audience, with answers via Twitter and projection of results via PowerPoint. This way, a true cognitive communication 2.0 took place.