Category Archives: Twitter

Press release: On Twitter, history students bring the First World War back to life in real time one century later

01/04/2014Actualités / News, Digital Humanities, TwitterTwitter, WW1Benoit Majerus

On the occasion of the First World War commemorations, Masters of Modern European History students at the University of Luxembourg are using Twitter to recount, day after day, the twists and turns of the conflict via the @RealTimeWW1 account.

A conflict in 140 characters; an entire peace treaty in two lines; history written in tweets… and at university, what’s more…This is the wild gamble attempted by the teaching staff on the Masters in Modern European History at the University of Luxembourg, to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. Each tweet is published one hundred years day for day — or even hour for hour — after the event it recounts. Almost 200 tweets have already been published and more than 1,500 others are in the pipeline, repainting the sweeping canvas of a destructive conflict that cost 9 million lives and left 8 million with terrible injuries!

Consequently, on 24^th January 2014, a tweet announced the warning from the French War Ministry of the risk of a conflict that could threaten stocks of food for the inhabitants or Paris. The next day, another tweet announced that the Paris city council had decided to purchase 400,000 euros worth of flour stocks. For Benoît Majerus, a researcher and lecturer in history, as well as the director of Masters studies, behind this initiative, the Twitter account @RealTimeWW1 makes it possible to follow “day after day, hour after hour, the sequence of minor or major events that make up an international conflict”… and which seem so similar to news that is currently reaching us from certain hot spots on the planet, such as the tweet on 11^th March announcing the vote by the Russian parliament of significant credits to arm the infantry and navy.

Four classes of students involved

The Masters in Modern European History is well placed to run this project: the lectures are given in three languages (French, English and German) to students of 8 different nationalities in a country (Luxembourg) which paid a heavy tribute to the conflict and is a particular embodiment of bridges between European countries. The four classes of students involved in the project are able to consult a large range of documents from the era, in many different languages: English, French, German, Luxembourgish, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Greek and Italian.

This project is part of the “digital humanities” movement, which involves human and social sciences filtered through the prism of information technology. Digital humanities draw on the use of digitised historical sources. As a result, all the tweets on @RealTimeWW1 are accompanied by a link to a document from the era that can be consulted on line. Similarly, using an everyday social network to revive major historical occurrences is an experiment ideally designed for the discipline of digital humanities. It also makes it possible to explore means of knowledge production and broadcasting specific to the 21^st century.

The social network Twitter has already been used for historic “live-tweets” of varying magnitude. The @RealTimeWWII account run by Allwin Collinson paved the way with more than 7,300 tweets published since 2012, recounting the Second World War 70 years afterwards. The University of Oxford also ran the @Arras95 account for one and a half months, covering the battle of Arras 95 years later (from 9^th April to 16^th May 1917/2012).

The first tweets from the @RealTimeWW1 account focused on the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), attempts by the peoples of Europe under the domination of the Ottoman Empire to emancipate themselves. These conflicts provoked the Balkan crisis of 1914 and are etched in history as the “prelude to the First World War”. After having covered the entire Great War, the account will stay live until 2018 to describe the first years of the post-war period.

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Masters in Modern European History: a historical perspective is of paramount importance for tomorrow’s professionals working in the political, academic and business worlds in being able to tackle future socio-political matters. The Masters in Modern European History allows the students to develop the necessary expertise to explore modern European issues. With its many links to European and cultural institutions as well as multi-national companies located in Luxembourg, this course of study offers an enriching and stimulating environment. The Masters aims to develop a first-rate course of study in European history by offering lectures based on critical appreciation and theoretical thinking. The programme is focused on questions and issues that make up European history, such as the process of European integration and construction in all its political and socio-economic aspects, social and cultural construction of identities, intra- and extra-European migration, as well as European relations with other regions of the world.

The programme of studies places particular emphasis on training experts in Digital Humanities and Public History, combining historical theory and its practical application.

http://h-europe.uni.lu/ | @940europe

About the University of Luxembourg

The University of Luxembourg, founded in 2003, is a multilingual, international research university with 6200 students and staff from all over the globe. Its research focuses on international finance, ICT security, systems biomedicine, European law, business law and educational sciences.

Contact for media: Associate Professor Benoît Majerus, benoit.majerus@uni.lu, T. + 352 46 66 44 6744

Benoit Majerus

Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.

Using Twitter in a large auditorium

08/02/2013Digital Humanities, TwitterBenoit Majerus

Screenshot from 2013-02-08 06:43:18 — Part of a discussion around neo-colonialism

This is the fourth post that I publish on a Twitter experiment I did last year at the Université libre de Bruxelles (here, here and here). Yesterday I was invited to speak at a symposium entitled “e-Learning@UniGR – Insights/Capabilities/Prospects” on this experience. It was for me the occasion to continue to work on the results provided by the poll I took with the education service of the ULB.

One of my biggest fear was my inability to control the tweets students would post and that would immediately appear on the twitter livestream on the big screen behind me.

Half of the tweets were directly related to the content of the lecture:

students asked questions and got responses from other students
twice they did reveal faults in my slides and provided links to wikipedia to prove that I was wrong 🙂
they referred to websites interesting for the topic of the class
sometimes they started discussions on topics related to the course but not touched on in my teaching; in the lecture of colonisation, a discussion on the question if NGOs were neocolonial institutions was initiated by a student without me referring to this problematic

A quart of the tweets were about organisational problems and a quart was not related at all to the lecture. They were however not very disturbing and provoked some funny moments. The fear of a slippery comments proved to be unfounded, at least in this class.

In the survey we distributed during the last lecture of this course (more here), we also asked the students to evaluate the experience. At the end of this post, you will find the detailed results. The strongest argument in favour of Twitter, for the students, was a better conviviality inside this large auditorium. Of the 300 students that attended the class on a regular basis, only 13 did intervene actively on Twitter. But for all – at least a large majority (85% of the respondents) – (strongly) agreed with the following proposal: “Cela introduit une ambiance conviviale”. This good atmosphere made lecturing for me very pleasant, even in such a large “classroom”¹.

Chart a – Better understanding

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
14%	52%	27%	7%

Chart b – Amelioration of the concentration

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
8%	28%	34%	30%

Chart c – Better conviviality

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
44%	41%	12%	3%

Chart d – Distracting

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
13%	22%	37%	29%

Chart e – Not useful

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
14%	24%	29%	33%

For those who want/need more arguments for using Twitter in classroom, read Junco, R., G. Heibergert, and E. Loken. ‘The Effect of Twitter on College Student Engagement and Grades’. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2010): 1–14. [↩]

Benoit Majerus

Using Twitter during a lecture – accessibility of internet devices

19/03/2012Digital Humanities, TwitterTwitterBenoit Majerus

In order to evaluate the Twitter experience I tried last term, the education service of the ULB distributed a questionnaire at the end of the class. A first set of questions revolved around the accessibility of devices that would allow students to use Twitter in the classroom. 95.5% of the respondents had either a laptop or cell phone which give them access to Internet. Without minimizing the argument that the use of new media could be a factor of social exclusion, these figures indicate that this seems no longer to be the case.

The laptop has become particularly widespread: four fifths of respondents have one. More surprising for me was the high rate of students who have a smartphone: 47%. If the equipment rate is very high, all do not bring their laptop or smartphone in the classroom, far from it. 39% always leave at home, 32% use it sometimes in the course and 29% consistently. Internet use during the course was therefore limited not by the financial inability of students to have the necessary equipment but by their reluctance to bring it to the university. The reasons for this are multiple.

Reasons not to bring your internet device to class (n = 101, multiple answers possible)

Too bulky to carry	Not enough battery life	Risk of loss or theft	Risk of distraction during the class	I do not see the point
63.4%	28.7%	30.7%	46.5%	16.8%

Two aspects are problematic for most students. On the one hand laptops are considered too bulky to transport. Is this related to the fact that cheap laptops are often relatively heavy? Why are netbooks like the Asus Eee PC not used more heavily? Will the arrival of the tablets change the game?¹ A second barrier is the fear of distraction, fear also expressed by colleagues when I told them about the exercise. The limited autonomy of the battery (given as the only reason in 7% of cases) and the risk of loss or theft (given as the only reason only once) are other significant barriers.

I did not see students using one during my class. Contrary to the States where tablet ownership is already widespread, this seems not to be the case in Belgium. Liberat Ntibashirakandi actually plans a study on the topic at the ULB [↩]

Benoit Majerus

Using Twitter during a lecture – some technical remarks

16/12/2011TwitterDigital Humanities, TwitterBenoit Majerus

Bertrand Formet who animates an excellent blog on experiences with Twitter in French-speaking schools around the world asked me some technical details after my first post.

First of all, I invited students to publish their comments/questions with the hashtag #hist155, hist155 being the administrative code of my class. I used Tweetdeck to search the Twitter-stream and display the comments.

The second problem was more difficult to solve. There was only one projector: if you use the slide-show modus from your word processor, in my case LibreOffice, your screen is completely filled out and you are not able to display at the same time Tweetdeck. The aim of the experience was however to display at the same time my slides and the questions/comments from the students to create some sort of interactivity. There seems to be no “proper” fix to solve this problem. A user of DigitalHumanities.org offered me the following solution: “just show a Google Doc presentation in a browser stretched to 4/5 of the your screen’s width and your Twitter app taking up the remaining 20%.” And that’s what I did.

Last unsolved problem was the conservation of the tweets, a problem I hadn’t think about at the beginning. Twitter only allows you to search the tweets of the last two weeks. Several people proposed Twatterkeeper, but they have been recently bought by HootSuite and no longer offer this help. Other services such as ThinkUp don’t allow search for hashtags but only for people. So together with the education service of the ULB, we copied the tweets in a spreadsheet.

The picture was taken by one of the students (@trankim90) during my class and posted on twitter with the hashtag hist155.

Benoit Majerus

Using Twitter during a lecture – how to evaluate the experience?

10/12/2011TwitterDigital Humanities, TwitterBenoit Majerus

More than a year ago, I read an article on Mashable about how Monica Rankin(UT Dallas) used Twitter during her lecture. And this semester I had to give a class on European History in the 19th and 20th century in the largest “classroom” (cf. picture) of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), which offers seats for 1 200 students. Very quickly I was quite frustrated by the fact that an interaction with these first-year students from political science, sociology… was difficult. And so I thought about using Rankin’s idea, even if her setting was different, because she had “only” 90 students.

As the end of the term approaches, I would like to evaluate this experience together with the education service of the ULB. What are the questions you would ask students?