Chaseten Remillard (chaseten.remillard@royalroads.ca) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada. Tyler Nagel (tyler.1nagel@royalroads.ca) is an Associate Faculty member in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada.

In a blended graduate research methods course for the Master of Arts in Professional Communications degree program at Royal Roads University, students are required to join a Twitter community comprised of their cohort peers and the instructors. As part of their weekly activities, students are called upon to post media stories and internet sources that have used or profiled academic research. Students then find the original source of research and discuss the “translation” of the findings presented in the original paper compared with how those findings were presented in the media or internet source.

Rationale

The internet is the primary location for the dissemination of information and news in our contemporary society (Geiger, 2019). As consumers of information, we are confronted with a problem of too much information, rather than too little. As such, we are less in an information economy, since information is now plentiful, and instead in an attention economy (Nixon, 2017).

An important learning outcome of any graduate program is the capacity of students to understand and comment on academic research. This need is magnified in a professional communication program, where the general standards for the quality of communication of the output or comment (beyond the quality of scholarship in the output or comment itself) is higher than in other programs (science, for example). In industry, professional communicators are tasked with the job of winning audience attention for the purpose of achieving their organization’s goals. As such, students in a graduate program in professional communication need to be both excellent consumers of academic research and effective, ethical communicators of such research.

Learning to “consume” research is a skill that is too easily taken for granted. Such a skill takes time and practice to develop and demands regular and repeated exposure to academic writing and research. The skill is often undervalued by students, as they tend to focus on the end results of research, rather than the process of research (Gross & Latham, 2007).

Subsequent to consumption of research is communication and comment. After graduation, many professional communication students assume or continue in roles where they actively make decisions about what information is most strategic to share with their organization’s stakeholders and the public. As such, another important learning outcome of a graduate degree in professional communication is the cultivation of a higher level of discernment as both research consumers and media gatekeepers. Students and practitioners of professional communication have an ethical responsibility to curate and disseminate academic research in a transparent and accurate manner, especially in a new media ecology of “fake news” (Stroud, 2019).

The goal of this learning activity is threefold: to deepen the critical capacities of graduate students as consumers of academic research, to sharpen their communication skill, and to foster student insight into ethics of the act of research dissemination .

As such, the activity fosters active and authentic learning by replicating some key elements of research that occur outside the academy. As Piwowar et al. (2018) found, more than 50% of academic research is only available through subscription or purchase. The activity replicates how research circulates outside the “flat” information flow (Gayo-Avello, 2015) of academia, which gatekeeps accredited and authoritative sources, building student capacity to address the data-driven moderation of social media. Finally, the assignment creates an opportunity for students to become more cognizant of the ways in which information is “stolen” and used by others (Bailey & Trudy, 2018) in contemporary communication practice.

Creating public communication is a mental and emotional challenge for many individuals, and professional communications students (even at the graduate level) are no exception. Creating communication in a closed or anonymous environment can be an effective steppingstone in developing confidence to communicate publicly, and as a secondary benefit, has been shown to dramatically increase student engagement and confidence in classroom situations (Holzer et al., 2014).

Overview

In this activity, students create a learning community on Twitter. Each student creates an “avatar” account with a specific username that is unique to the course and their own first name and initial. For example, a student named Jane Doe in the course COMM656 would adopt a newly minted Twitter account with the name COMM656_JaneD. Likewise, all the other students and instructors would use the same naming protocol for their accounts.

For these new accounts, students are requested not to follow any other Twitter user except other students and instructors in the same course and not to use hashtags (to limit public exposure to the discussion). In so doing, the community of learners is largely anonymous (because of their use of course-specific avatars), and the discussion can remain relatively private (since the group of students only follow each other and make no efforts to connect to larger discussions through hashtags). Alternatively, students can choose to make their accounts private.

Students are organized into teams and each team is assigned a specific week of “Twitter Leadership.” During this week, the team is called upon to find media and online sources that have used academic research. They must also find the original research featured in the media or online source. They then post the original story or webpage link, and they make available the original academic research that was used in the article. Other students then read both the media or online “translation” of the research and the original research. The leadership team poses guided questions and polls within Twitter about the research and is tasked with stimulating debate and discussion.

At the end of the week, the leadership team writes a reflection on the week’s activity. The reflection calls upon the team to comment on the main points of discussion, the accuracy of the “translation” of the research into the media sources, and the ways they think the research could have been better communicated. The reflection also calls upon the team to comment on elements of method and methodology as exemplified in the research paper.

Importantly, part of the discussion led by the Twitter Leadership team and their reflection is about the ethics of “translation” their example presents. Students discuss the ways the research is simplified, distorted, and expressed differently than perhaps the original authors intended. Such discussion typically reinforces the important role research plays in shaping public discourse, how professional communicators contribute to that discourse, and the need for better literacy about how research is created (and its limitations).

The use of an online and open platform such as Twitter, versus a closed in-course forum-based discussion board, has three advantages. First, students can easily access Twitter from their mobile devices and can participate and engage with each other more readily throughout their day. Such regular engagement is beneficial in building a stronger learning community (Hu & Hui, 2012).

Second, the nature of the assignment demands an efficient mechanism to connect content on the web and on various media platforms. Social media, by its design, is a platform that enables such sharing easily and efficiently (Kietzman et al., 2011). Often students can find different manifestations of the same research in different media forms and can share these new sources with classmates quickly and in real-time.

Third, as a mode of communication, Twitter (and other social platforms) demand a unique form of writing and communicating. Important information is shared on social media, and professional communicators need to understand and feel comfortable using social platforms to communicate complex ideas (such as those found in academic research). Platform use functions as a form of literacy in professional practice.

Assessment of the activity is both quantitative and qualitative. From a quantitative perspective, engagement in the discussion is measured through the number of tweets per week, up to a predefined ceiling each week (to ensure an equal distribution of engagement over the term). For example, each tweet may achieve 0.15 percent of a participation grade, to a maximum of 1.5 percent per week. In a ten-week course, such engagement would account for 15 percent of the course total.

Qualitatively, weekly Twitter Leadership teams are assessed on both the quality of questions and sources brought to the discussion and summarized in the team’s reflection as well as by how well the reflection engaged with larger questions of method and methodology covered in the course material.

Students tend to react to the assignment in one of two ways. Some students resist the assignment’s use of Twitter as a platform, possibly out of a lack of familiarity with the platform, or a biased appraisal of the usefulness (or rather, lack of usefulness) of social media in general. The viewpoints of these detractors tend to evolve over the duration of the course, but some students cling to their disavowal of Twitter, in some cases despite admissions that the platform was more useful and engaging than originally considered.

Other students are truly excited to use a social media platform to discuss and connect with academic research as found in media and web sources. These students tend to lead the charge in the discussions and often bring many interesting and timely examples of how research is constantly being mobilized in a variety of public sources and discourses.

Overall, from informal and formal feedback, students enjoy the assignment and state they have learned a lot from each other and feel a higher level of research literacy and platform familiarity after the course.

Reflection

The assignment carries both some clear benefits and challenges from an instructor’s perspective.

Beneficially, enabling students to connect to academic research outside of the confines of library searches enlivens research for students and drives an understanding of how academic research can (and is) used to support various social actions, decisions, misinformation, and discourses.

Online discussion forums have become a standard for online interaction in courses. By the time students reach graduate studies, they may have taken dozens of courses that involve discussion forums and a fatigue may set in as forums are overused (Lieberman, 2019). This assignment offers a respite from forum-based engagement activities, and a fresh approach to fostering class discussion. From an instructor perspective, it can be invigorating to moderate a new form of class discussion – “a change is as good as a holiday.”

In the future, the assignment could be expanded. A possible addition to the assignment could be student-curated research that contributes or contradicts statements made in online media and news sources. Students could be tasked to contribute to public discussion about research, but with the aim of expanding public literacy of how research is designed, conducted, and disseminated.

References

Bailey, M. & Trudy. (2018). On misogynoir: Citation, erasure, and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 762–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395

Gayo-Avello, D. (2015). Social media, democracy, and democratization. IEEE MultiMedia, 22(2), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2015.47

Geiger, A.W. (2019). Key findings about online news landscape in America. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/11/key-findings-about-the-online-news-landscape-in-america/

Gross, M. and Don Latham (2007). Attaining information literacy: An investigation of the relationship between skill level, self-estimates of skill, and library anxiety, Library & Information Science Research 29 (2007): 332–53;

Holzer, A., Govaerts, S., Vozniuk, A., Kocher, B., & Gillet, D. (2014). Speakup in the classroom: Anonymous temporary social media for better interactions. CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1171–1176. https://doi.org/10.1145/2559206.2581211

Hu, P. J.-H., & Hui, W. (2012). Examining the role of learning engagement in technology-mediated learning and its effects on learning effectiveness and satisfaction. Decision Support Systems, 53(4), 782–792. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2012.05.014

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011) Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 4(3), 241–251

Lieberman, M. (2019, March 27). New approaches to discussion boards aim for dynamic online learning experiences. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/03/27/new-approaches-discussion-boards-aim-dynamic-online-learning

Nixon, Bruce. (2017). The business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Group’s efforts to capitalize on news consumption. Journalism 21(1), 73-94.

Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., Farley, A., West, J., & Haustein, S. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of open access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

Stroud, Scott. (2019). Pragmatist media ethics and challenges of fake news. Journal of Media Ethics, 34(4), 178-192.