For the Georgia Tech Celebration of Teaching Day in Spring 2018, I developed a poster based on my Twitter Essay activity, where students posted tweet threads of works in progress to Twitter using their course hashtags and then responded to one another’s individual tweets.
For the poster, I used NodeXL to create a database of student tweets and then used Gephi to visualize the interactions between students. Using social media as a space for writing and commenting helped increase interaction as students responded to focused individual tweets, which ensured they focused on their peers’ ideas rather than writing style. Students appreciated the quick peer feedback and said that this method helped them organize the posters they created later, as well as helped them fill in research gaps they wouldn’t have recognized on their own.