Social media as a means for data collection in educational research: a twitter case study

Abstract

This article reports a case study on the use of Twitter as a qualitative research tool in Education. In the study carried out, Twitter was used to support the application of a data collection questionnaire for an investigation into the use of podcasts in education. The report presented seeks to describe how the collection was conducted and focuses on investigating the use of Twitter as a means for collecting data from the three principles that delimit the concept of Cyberspace proposed by Lévy (1999): the interconnection, the creation of virtual communities and collective intelligence. From the work carried out, it was possible to verify that social media, as they have a high potential for spreading messages, can be an effective means of data collection from the sharing of users themselves, observing the characteristics of the audience of each platform for explore it in the most appropriate way.