Twitter News in Education Platform for Collaborative Learning

Traditional NIE (Newspaper in Education), which is the study of how to utilize any educational resources in the newspaper in the classroom, has been studied for a long time. However, it has a one-way interaction characteristic and available media are limited. In addition, it has difficulty capturing the latest "hot" issues or recognizing any public opinions. In this paper, we propose a platform called TNIE (Twitter News in Education) that utilizes Twitter news in education. TNIE has many advantages compared to traditional NIE: (i) it provides a classification of the latest news on various topics to the learners, (ii) classified news content can be browsed effectively via a hierarchical visualization scheme, and (iii) effective discussion or debate groups can be easily made from the learners based on their selection of the news. To evaluate the performance of our scheme, we implemented a prototype system and performed several experiments. We also had volunteers use our prototype system and evaluate its main functions. We report some of these evaluation results.