Turning tweets into thinking: My journey using Twitter to teach Critical Thinking

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I am extremely proud of this idea. Designing meaningful tasks for my students was always a challenge—but I saw it also as an opportunity. In our fourth-year course "Cultural Mediations through the Arts" at Universitas Miguel Hernández, we decided to experiment with something bold: using Twitter (now X) as a learning tool. At first, it felt risky. Could a social media platform really help students develop critical thinking and creativity? But over several years, we saw something remarkable happen. Students went from passively consuming content to actively creating it—tweeting weekly reflections on complex cultural theories, paired with original or remixed images, memes, or gifs. They had to be concise, thoughtful, and creative. And they were. We didn’t stop there. We added a peer-review component using Moodle, where students anonymously critiqued each other’s tweets. This helped them move from vague personal opinions to more structured, analytical feedback. Their final tweets showed a real evolution—not just in how they expressed ideas, but in how they understood and questioned them.

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