6

Pragmatics of Twitter use for academics: tweeting in and out of the classroom

Lynne Y. Williams and Jackie Krause

Abstract:

Twitter evolved from blogs and is a hybrid between blogging and instant messaging. While blogging is typically a desktop computer activity, Twitter is deliberately designed for easy use with a hand-held device, such as a smartphone. Twitter caters to the mobile blogger by requiring them to keep their posts down to a maximum of 140 characters, which is referred to as microblogging or tweeting. The resulting tweets have an air of immediacy, of what the tweeter is doing in the moment. Tweeters can follow other tweeters with similar interests, and the immediate nature of tweets gives a sense of knowing the tweeter being ...

Get Social Media for Academics now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.