How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching

In chapter two of Christian Vandendorpe's From Papyrus to Hypertext titled: In the beginning was the ear, Vandendorpe says it took millenia "for literature to free itself from primary orality, albeit not completely". In the beginning all reading was done out loud, and it was not until the 12th century that books were created for silent reading. Orthographic signs and the separation between words had appeared around the 7th century, but did not become common until the 9th century amongst the learned communities of monks. Walter J Ong, in his classic study of writing and orality, Orality and Literacy defines as the "technologizing of the word" the process of developing a new relationship between language and thought.

Something similar is happening today in academia. Just like Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence, many members of academia marvel (or react with rejection) at the rapid changes in the production and dissemination of scholarly work and interaction between academics and those "outside" academic institutions. Thousands of scholars and higher education institutions are participating in social media (such as Twitter), as an important aspect of their research and teaching work.

There is still considerable resistance to embracing social media tools for educational purposes, but if you are reading this article you are probably willing to consider their positive effects. New technologies have slow adoption cycles, and often the learning curve is steep. Those already using these tools within academic contexts should not be considered a priori as "the converted"; perception and usage of social media varies wildly, and due to the inherently fluid and malleable nature of the platforms themselves we are still in the process of assessing all their possibilities.

Mobile phones and tablets enable the user in producing content, and to publish and disseminate it online. The microblogging platform Twitter is purposefully designed to exchange information and to facilitate reciprocal communication and attribution, therefore enabling the creation of communities of individuals interested in common topics. But the easy part of tweeting is publishing content; the difficult side is actually committing to active public engagement.

This is the key question where "the ear", our ability to listen and to place ourselves in a particular context at a particular time, comes to the fore. In traditional scholarly communications, academics produced a document (a thesis, an article, a book) and then sent it to someone else to review it, edit it, publish it, distribute it. It was a unidirectional mode of operation, even if the document was produced by research teams. Today, more and more academics are creating content and posting it online. They make it available, but this does not necessarily guarantee people will read it. Whereas online availability is very important, what brings the process to fruition is engagement: the work of scholarly authorship does not end with publication: that is just the beginning. Therefore, the 21st century scholar has the tools not only to publish and disseminate, but also to facilitate the development of specialised audiences, and therefore of what is called "impact": people read, and in turn write about your work, which is in turn read by others.

As anyone who has attended a big academic conference knows, content saturation is not unique to the web. Services like Twitter, no matter how selectively we curate the sources we follow, require us to become active participants and not merely either information producers or consumers. Academics are trained to manage data streams and to make informed appraisals of the sources we find. These skills suit social media perfectly; what is still needed is to develop strategies to listen to our peers and audiences better, and to learn how to react publicly. Twitter can considerably level the playing field: you are not on the podium or on a stage. It is not meant to be an auditorium, but a seminar room.

"It's a conversation, not a lecture," is a well-known trope that is useful to remember in the scholarly web. This does not mean we should spend every waking hour chatting to strangers on social networks; it means that social media is not a uni-directional broadcasting tool. Those who "follow" us online are likely to be our students, colleagues, employers. They are not a passive audience.

The reply function exists for a reason: as part of the crowd, the individual follower will appreciate being recognised. Simultaneously, listening actively offers valuable benefits, like continuous and sincere micro-feedback. For higher education, social media is part of a process of democratisation. Its effective use can lead to an ethical shift towards active efforts for engaging new audiences and widening participation beyond the Ivory Tower's walls. It all starts with the ear. Are you listening?

Dr Ernesto Priego is the managing editor of The Comics Grid. He contributes to Global Voices online, Networked Researcher and Inside Higher Education/The University of Venus

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