The growing popularity of various social media has prompted educators to explore these tools' utility for teaching and learning. Overall, educators and educational technologists agree that social media have good potential applications to support learning. Increasingly, abstract arguments about potential applications of social media are followed up with scholarship that documents specific uses of Web 2.0 tools in education and the impact they have on students. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that investigated the application of a social medium - specifically, microblogging - in the large lecture classroom in order to assess whether microblogging can make participation in the large lecture classroom more comfortable for students with high communication apprehension. We present original data collected in the context of a freshman Technology large-lecture course in which microblogging service Yammer was introduced mid-semester and used for student participation. Students were assessed pre- and post-intervention through online surveys that asked about perceptions of classroom interactions and learning, as well as measures of communication apprehension and technology readiness. We analyze the set of 69 pre- and post-intervention survey pairs in order to identify relationships among communication apprehension, technology readiness, and comfort with classroom participation, both face to face and through microblogging. Microblogging is a type of social software platform that enables users to post brief messages and to follow and read other users' messages. The most popular public microblogging platform is Twitter, however, there are several other microblogging platforms available, some of them specialized for industry use (e.g. Yammer), and even for education (e.g. Edmodo). Four main educational benefits emerge from previous research that has explored the use of microblogging in higher education: community building, collaboration, informal learning, and engagement. These applications and benefits of microblogging are reviewed next.
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