For Profs, YouTube Tops Twitter and Facebook

From a Babson study collecting responses from 1,920 faculty at various types of institutions.
News: To Profs, YouTube Tops Twitter:

Probing the uses of nine different types of social media among professors, the study found that professors consider YouTube the most useful tool by far -- for both teaching and non-classroom professional use. Nearly a third of respondents said they instructed students to watch online videos as homework, and about 73 percent said they thought YouTube videos were either somewhat or very valuable for classroom use, regardless of whether they use them currently.

Other Web 2.0 tools fared less well among the professors -- particularly the tools with the most currency in broader culture. Only 2 percent of the professors said they used Twitter in class, and another 2 percent said they used it for professional purposes outside the classroom. Slightly more said they could see at least some value in the microblogging site, but those long-sellers still amounted to less than a tenth of all respondents.

Facebook, too, is tapped in class or for homework assignments only rarely, even if many professors use the site for personal or professional networking. Faculty rate the site's long-term prospects in the classroom only slightly above Twitter's, with 15 percent submitting that it is at least somewhat valuable.

Many professors -- 53 percent and 46 percent, respectively -- think that Twitter and Facebook not only lack pedagogical value but in fact harm classroom learning. (They did not say why.)