I originally set up a @BucksMAPP Twitter account a couple of years ago (August 2013) aimed at students on the MSc Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) as a way of quickly sharing links and web resources in a way that other methods didn't allow quite so easily.Email would have been the obvious other choice, but it wasn't so easy to send a link to a group email from my phone with just a couple of taps. Similarly, Blackboard (Bb) didn't allow a quick way to share in this way. Twitter did, so I set up an account for the MAPP (already having one myself), and then embedded the Twitter feed in the Bb module shells for each of the modules on the MAPP. This meant that even students who were not users of Twitter could access the tweets via Bb.
The aim was to encourage sharing between students on the course as part of the emerging MAPP community. Some students occasionally would send an email to the student group, or post a link on one of the Bb discussion boards. The use of Twitter in this way helped to show other ways of sharing resources and gave me a quick way of sharing things that I thought may be of interest to students.
Since then, the number of followers has increased modestly to show that the Twitter feed is of interest to people outside of the course and tweets have acknowledged that through more 'promotional' tweets, such as those promoting the PG Open Evenings. However, the underlying aim is still to support and develop the broader MAPP community.
I am just beginning to explore other ways of using Twitter to support learning, such as those discussed here. Even something as basic as using hashtags! It's a brave new world ;-)
