Using Microblogging to facilitate Community of Inquiry

An Australian tertiary experience

Abstract

The usage of Twitter as part of tertiary learning is growing and is increasingly a common scene. However, most institutions use Twitter for social information exchange rather than deep pedagogical use. Here we experiment with Twitter based on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) approach using two undergraduate cohorts from Australia and America. Both cohorts were asked to exchange messages and discuss on a given topic for three weeks via Twitter. Our findings show that all three types of presence from the CoI model, viz. cognitive, social and teaching, can be facilitated by the use of Twitter in teaching. This demonstration of the use of microblogging for pedagogical use is a significant contribution to the higher education literature since previous studies' findings are largely limited to aspects of social presence.