Twitter Aids Teacher Evaluations

Stieger, Stefan, and Christoph Burger. "Let's Go Formative: Continuous Student Ratings with Web 2.0 Application Twitter." CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking 13.2 (2010): 163-167. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.

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In this article, authors Stefan Stieger and Christoph Burger present and test the idea of college students evaluating their teachers using Twitter. The authors make it a point that the evaluations of teachers are highly important to colleges today, and are taken very seriously. With that being said, Stieger and Burger conducted studies on how effective Twitter would be as a tool for students to do teacher evaluations. The authors found that because of Twitter’s easy use, the students evaluations came out to be more beneficial because they were more detailed and honest. The authors feel that Twitter, and other social networks as a whole, have a lot of potential to change the way we look at day to day activities. The research done by Burger and Stieger also helped them realize that doing teacher evaluations on Twitter rather than paper and pencil gave teachers more information because the Twitter teacher analysis strategy was done weekly rather than at the end of each semester.

The point of view presented by the authors in this article is beneficial to readers because it shows readers a way Twitter can be used for better education. The authors believe that Twitter can aid the way we do teacher evaluations because students are more comfortable with social networking tools and because that is what they are used to in their day-to-day lives. Readers that take this point of view in consideration will see that the information that the authors present help prove what the authors believe, but the information presented also leaves a window open for people to disagree as well. Censoring user’s tweets could go against the authors’ point of view because it might take away students opportunity to answer the teacher evaluation questions honestly. This statement proves that the point of view presented by the authors is worth taking into consideration when forming an opinion on Twitter and censorship.