Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2010) 000–000

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

Teachers for the Knowledge Society

Teacher education in 140 characters -

microblogging implications for continuous education,
training, learning and personal development
Gabriela Grossecka* , Carmen Holotescub
a
West University of Timisoara, 4 Bd Vasile Parvan, 300223 Timisoara, Romania
b
Politehnica University of Timisoara, 2 Bd Vasile Parvan, 300222 Timisoara, Romania

Abstract

The generic purpose of this paper is to explore the way teachers’ activities and continuous education blend with the
microblogging technology. The research question focused on whether and how microblogging succeeds to be a quality factor in
teacher education. The analysis was made possible by the facilities provided by the cirip.eu microblogging platform, specially
designed for educational settings. We performed a SWOT analysis of the platform for teachers’ personal / professional
development. Our findings revealed the efficiency of microblogging as a training technology, positioning cirip.eu within the
spectrum of educational services for an efficient continuous education, training, learning and personal development of teachers.

© 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: microblogging; training; learning; continuous education; teachers

**
Gabriela Grosseck. Tel.: +0-040-256-592266; fax: +0-040-256-592320
E-mail address: ggrosseck@socio.uvt.ro.
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1. Introduction

With the emergence / increased use of Web 2.0 tools in education (Selwyn, 2009), a large number of institutions
are embracing the opportunities offered by social media. However, although a whole literature and projects around
virtual learning environments for formal education are being created, a relatively small number of studies and
researches refer to teachers’ continuous training both in formal and informal settings. In this context our paper
focuses on an approach based on microblogging, as a result of an exploratory study carried out by the authors over
the last two years, to support the efforts towards teachers’ training and their continuous pedagogical
professionalization.

2. Paper work context

The practical part of the paper focused on a question raised very often but almost never clarified: whether and
how microblogging succeeds to be a quality factor in teachers’ education. The social media application cirip.eu was
chosen because it acts as a social network, as a multimedia microblogging platform, but also as a social learning
environment. It is a dynamic, user-centred environment (see Figure 1) that engages participatory experiences,
collective learning, transforming the traditional, blended learning space in many ways:

Figure 1 Learning contexts on the microblogging platform cirip.eu

– Learning and Training. In the last two years, formal and informal courses and trainings (hosted in private
groups) for teachers and trainers in schools and / or universities were organized by different institutions or
during European educational projects. Courses and trainings held in the last two years on the cirip.eu
platform (like cursmb, iac09, iac10, wetentm etc.) have new educational technologies and social learning as
central topics. The statistics, timelines, network sections and different visualizations of these groups proved a
high interest and involvement of teachers (see Figure 2).
– Practising. Usually the interaction in the groups and on the platform continued after the courses/trainings
ended, the members continued to learn and to practise the knowledge gained during the courses, the
continuous activity being illustrated by the timelines of the microblogs. The learning community built in
each group was enlarged with cirip members such as students, trainers, teachers, and specialists, becoming a
real community of practice. Almost all of the teachers who participated in formal trainings built their own
Personal Learning Environment / Network (PLE/PLN) on cirip, which included:
○ Connection / communication / sharing ideas and resources with the users they followed.
○ Groups for national and international conferences, workshops, events, project management.
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○ Sites / blogs / networks feeds and search feeds.
○ Social networks providing educational objects / OERs (Open Educational Resources), which can be
included in messages etc.
– Meta-learning. In the special group on the platform dedicated to learning designs (The Learning Scenarios
group - lds), the teachers discuss, validate and improve the scenarios of learning activities and courses they
develop, formalizing them as mindmaps embedded in cirip notes (see Figure 3). Another advantage is that
they can also find peers for peer-mentoring their courses.

1. SWOT analysis of microblogging platform cirip for teachers’ education

In order to shed light on the research question, we conducted a SWOT analysis of using the cirip platform for
teachers’ education, to ascertain their key competences and abilities of using it for personal / professional
development.

STRENGTHS
• Flexibility of the platform – access to public or private groups through a variety of devices and applications,
by anyone with a cirip or Twitter account.
• Usability in terms of third party applications (ciripAPI, widgets/gadgets, export/import); aggregation of
additional resources through RSS feeds/Twingly search engine (like blogs, social bookmarking systems such
as delicious, social networking sites); tagging; searching; embedding multimedia objects; polling;
visualizations; statistics etc.
• Openness to OERs - multimedia objects from social networks around OERs, embedded in messages, become
part of the conversation/communication flow of the platform, and of the members' microblogs/portfolios.
Such objects can be retrieved for documentation, but also can be created collaboratively by members. Let's
note that microblogs, discussions on differents topics, groups, so different streams themselves become open
educational resources.
• Mobile functionality through SMS or m.cirip.ro - enable ambient research practices (McNely, 2009).
• Breaking the ephemeral nature of conversational stream (McNely, 2009) – on cirip all messages are
archived, and can be retrieved via browsing or searching.
• Real time access to knowledge – flexible / extensible time schedule for individual study.
• Raising awareness of a particular topic - using tagging or resending mechanisms, but also creating groups
on specific topics.
• Mobilization through a facile access to other members’ PLE/PLN. cirip allows asymmetric social
relationships.
• Serendipitous learning - building knowledge spontaneously (Reinhardt et al., 2009).
• Collective learning and creating learning relationships. One can use cirip as a „laminated discursive space”
(McNeill, 2009) to extend his/her social graph towards development of communities of practice and
learning.
• Professional networking (McNeill, 2009).
• Encouraging participation (event the shy persons can be part of it).
• Teachers act like social reporters. Using a RSS feed they do not have to log in to cirip to receive updates, to
aggregate conference proceedings etc. (Ross et al., 2010).
• Support collaborative research / projects run with students or others members.

Figure 2 Visualisation of members’ group Figure 3 Mindmap embedded in a cirip note

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Group Microblogging course,

http://www.cirip.ro/grup/cursmb Group Learning Scenarios, http://www.cirip.ro/grup/lds
source: http://www.cirip.ro/status/2488153
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WEAKNESSES
• A (more) user-friendly interface when posting multimedia objects like presentations from slideshare,
documents from scribd, music from deezer or blip.fm etc.
• Poor infrastructure – not all teachers have a broadband Internet connection (e.g. to engage in live-streaming
can be sometimes difficult).
• Time costs – sometimes it takes too long to follow the informational stream.
• Fatigue occurs following a rich information flow.
• Informational expansion. Using the microblogging platform as a crowdsourcing tool can lead to a difficulty
in making sense of the many conversations taking place simultaneously as relevant, useful, important or rich
in content.
• A voluminous stream. Sometimes the teacher has to filter the flow in order to separate (properly) the noise
from the real content (and to highlight the important notes according to his/her needs for learning).
• Multiplication of communication – for example if we supplement a recommended reading list with stream
items during a training course, this can lead to a spread in too many directions.
• Simple syntax of messages: there aren’t direct messages on cirip like on Twitter; nor can one mark as favorite
a message/ a note – this operation is possible only in private groups.
• The lack of a critical mass participation – sometimes the curiosity is missing or there is a low interaction.

OPPORTUNITIES
• Learn to Read Social Media stream (Couros, 2010). Microblogging is an alternative in learning from specific
events (like conferences, workshops, symposia etc.), which could lead to informal learning.
• Engaging in active (and collaborative) learning; contribution to group learning; culture of community
(Dunlop and Lowenthal, 2009).
• Enhancing creativity: teachers generating contents (audio, video, digital stories).
• Development for a new socio-literate practice enabled / facilitated by the microblogging technology: time
and attention economy to find authentic resources on topics.
• Social story community. Documentation through messages in 140 characters can improve teachers’
knowledge / content production.
• Augmenting social learning. The stream isn’t just a social space governed by social conventions (Cogdill,
2001) but also a space for collaborative note-taking and shared learning experiences (Chang et al., 2010).
• Connecting teachers’ PLEs stimulates curiosity, which enhances learning. Teachers share information with /
from others specialists’ / practitioners’ microblogs. Furthermore, they can create informal networks with
peers inside and outside of their personal networks.
• Could foster a form of peer-to-peer learning and mentoring (McNely, 2009): asking, following ideas /
responses, learning from others.
• Scholarly resource (Serbanuta, Chao, Takazawa, 2010): gathering, archiving and making use of user
generated content (conversational / informational / emotional / self-expression flow).
• Reliable source of news: citing cirip notes in projects and research papers (Dunlop and Lowhental, 2009) as
electronic academic references. The message archive thus becomes a valuable resource for further studies.

As THREATS we identified: microblogging skepticism; time-sensitive contents; over enthusiasm / excitement;

over interpreting the relevance of this training method; and sometimes a social peripheral behavior (bad language,
sarcastic, critical / inappropriate comments – in literature the notion is snarkiness (snark=snide+remark). The
practice of using microblogging can also lead to track only (attendees’) reactions and not topical discussions
(Shamma, Kennedy, Churchill, 2010). We also noted the technological stress - from the technical point of view
some teachers could feel uncomfortable with platform facilities and above all the risk to emphasize only the
technology and not the pedagogy.

1. Final comments
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As we have seen in the previous section, a teacher can participate in the cycle of professional development
starting with any of the learning contexts (Figure 1). We have also noted that a number of teachers who have
participated in formal trainings became mentors for other teachers or organized courses on cirip, this way changing
their roles from trainees to trainers / facilitators. If Twitter and other microblogging platforms offer mainly the
practice context, we consider that cirip could provide the formal training and meta-learning contexts, because of its
special facilities. These facilities position it within the spectrum of educational services for an efficient continuous
education, training, learning and personal development of teachers.
However, we aim by all means at dealing with the various issues raised during the teachers’ learning evaluation
process. First of all, a preliminary briefing of teachers is required – some don’t know or fail to implement correctly
this technology, while others won’t adapt to the new requirements of integrating social media in their professional
development. Then it is suitable to eliminate the effects of incertitude, as in the case of any innovation or change.
Some of the difficulties are to create hierarchies of knowledge, to find and choose the relevant resources to post, and
to elaborate recommendations for applying this technology in proper education environments. And last but not least,
it is necessary to develop a centered quality model in terms of characteristics, measurement indicators and
evaluation criteria.
We also hope that the present paper represents a starting point / invitation to future reflections and studies for
reviewing, expanding and validating the theoretical basis of using microblogging by teachers. Thus, although we
refer explicitly to cirip.eu, our remarks are also applicable to other microblogging platforms / services (Twitter,
Identi.ca, Plurk, Edmodo, Yammer etc). „Think of it this way: Microblogging is the way in which you choose to
speak, while cirip.eu is the tool you use to talk to the world.” (apud Livingston, 2010).

2. References

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