Microblogging Case Study in Higher Education

Abstract

Recent research indicates that even though social media networking sites are commonly used in higher education, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. In this chapter, the experience of using Edmodo is analysed as learning aid to support group work in comparison with the level of familiarity, engagement, and frequency of use of social media technologies among university-level computer science students in Finland. The specific focus of the chapter is to examine the reception of the students towards the Edmodo platform. The data was collected through a social media familiarity questionnaire, Edmodo experience questionnaire, and interviews. The main findings are that the cohort was not very familiar with social media at the beginning of the course. This chapter provides experimental evidence that microblogging social networking sites and, more specifically, Edmodo can be used as an educational tool to help engage students more in the use of social media networking sites.