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Social Media and Teaching Excellence

(yellow marks where I advance the Prezi)

Begin by thanking Guardian Life for sponsoring the ceremony and for everyone at the
Instructional Development Unit—and especially Dr. Edwards-Henry—for making my first trip
to Trinidad and Tobago so memorable.

I’ve titled my talk today, “Five Reasons to Use Social Media in the Classroom.”

● Nold piece
○ In an article titled “Fear and Trembling,” Ellen Nold discusses the difficulties of
getting scholars to use the computer creatively in their teaching and research. In a
statement that might just as well be directed towards social scientists or natural
scientists, Nold suggests, “What is preventing humanists from using the
computer…is merely their belief that they cannot use the machine. It is ironic that
a group known to undertake calmly and surely the study of Latin, Greek, Russian,
Chinese, Swahili, or Gaelic often balks at the much simpler task of learning the
more logical, far less capricious language of the machine.”

Nold’s critique of fear and trembling on the part of scholars when faced with new
technology is timely. It addresses some of what is at the crux of integrating social
media into the classroom: nervousness and uncertainty on the part of the
professoriate…which is interesting since the article appeared in 1975…and was
discussing the use of the revolutionary, computational tool: the word processor.
○ Thirty-five years later, I’d be willing to guess that word processors have become
second nature and indispensable to most of us. The only time “fear and trembling”
might apply to the tool is when Microsoft radically overhauled the menu interface
for Word 2007.
○ If we’ve become used to using the word processor, surely we can become used to
using social media in the classroom
○ Of course, one difference between the two is that the word processor is something
that professors adopted before students. In this case, the tables have been turned.
We, perhaps, are the students when it comes to social media.
○ As such, we should perhaps briefly note what exactly social media is.
● Definition of social media
○ When we think of social media, we tend to think of a few big players: Facebook,
Twitter, perhaps MySpace, Friendster, Orkut
○ These social networks are certainly social media. But social networking is not the
only type of social media.
○ When I talk about social media, I prefer a wider definition. (Something along the
lines of the definition on the Wikipedia, itself a social medium)
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th
○ Media are how we communicate with one another. Throughout the 20 century,
we developed ever more pervasive and sophisticated broadcast/publishing media
that could reach more and more people: radio, traditional book publishing,
television, and eventually the Internet.
○ But access to these electronic and print media was expensive and centralized.
Even the Internet was expensive and limited at first, despite all the utopian
rhetoric associated with it.
○ With advances in technology in the 1990s and in the 2000s, the cost of
participating in content creation fell. Suddenly, almost anyone could be involved
in publishing or broadcast.
○ When almost anyone can be involved, the media landscape suddenly becomes
more communal, more participatory, more social.
○ Social media supplements traditional media models. Podcasts occupy the same
space as radio; blogs and wikis play along with traditional print publication; and
YouTube takes over television.
○ In short, you might say that any time we get our students creating and responding
to one another online that they are using social media.
● So that’s what social media is. As Howard Rheingold puts it at
http://socialmediaclassroom.com, “The power of social media in education […] derives
from their affordances for forms of communication and social behavior that were
previously prohibitively difficult or expensive….”
● Lowering the costs means that it’s easy for all of us to use social media in the classroom.
● But just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean that that use will necessarily be excellent.
So how do we go about encouraging excellence in the classroom with social media?
● As far as I’m concerned, the first step to being effective with social media is to ask
yourself why you want to include social media in your classes.
○ What are you hoping to accomplish? What learning outcomes do you desire?
○ And you don’t just need to know why you’re using social media for yourself; you
will need to make it clear to students why we are using social media in the
classroom.
○ We owe it to them to clarify how a new assignment—something very different
from what they’ve probably done before—will help them learn the course’s
content better.
● What, then, can social media add to the regular classroom dynamic or experience?

• Let me suggest 5 ways that social media can enhance the classroom
1. It gets the class knowing each other better, which improves the classroom
dynamic
a. Twitter (outside of class)
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i. I believe that getting people to know their classmates is an
important thing that social media can do.
ii. We all know that it’s easier to teach a class at the end of the term
than in the beginning. After several 15 weeks, we know one
another better. You know who they are and you know their
personalities. You can get away with a slightly different pedagogy,
and everyone has developed relationships that make it easier for
them to talk to one another.
iii. When used in the classroom, social media can do the impossible:
speed up time. We move more quickly to those last weeks of the
term where we know one another better and consequently reap the
benefits of that increased contact with one another.
iv. This happens when one uses Twitter or when students read each
others’ blog posts.
v. Football fan
vi. Faren’s story
1. In this moment, she explored the tool for its ability to shape
our perceptions of her.
vii. Discussions really did improve when using Twitter in the
classroom.
viii. People asking each other for help with assignments
1. They help each other because they have come to know each
other better. Social media is, in other words, a gift
economy.
ix. Summary
2. It provides a different pathway for people to be talking to each other and to be
participating. (Twitter inside class)
a. As Monica Rankin (UT Dallas) put it: “Most educators would agree that
large classes set in […] auditorium-style classrooms limit teaching options
to lecture, lecture, and more lecture. And most educators would also agree
that this is not the most effective way to teach.”
b. So another way that I’ve used Twitter in my classroom is as an in-class
backchannel.
c. So what I do is I project the students’ tweets on a large projection screen
like this. As I teach, the students are welcome to send messages from their
phones or computers, and all of the messages end up behind me.
d. This proves helpful in a lecture-based course because in that format,
students normally do not have the chance to engage with the teacher. The
professor is simply talking at the front of the room.
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e. Using Twitter in this way allows the students to talk to each other and
also to me.
f. There’s always a backchannel. This just allows me to capture that
backchannel and make it public, inviting the students to communicate with
each other.
g. I can look at the screen and respond to questions and get immediate
feedback on what I’m doing.
h. There’s the chance that the students will post sarcastic things about what
I’m doing or some mistake that I’ve made, but that still indicates that they
are engaged with class material.
i. In a smaller, discussion-based class it can also engage those who are less
vocal.
j. Summary
3. It allows the conversation to continue easily outside the space and time of the
classroom. It makes things asynchronous.
a. The asynchronous nature of social media means that you and your
students can get to things when you have time for them or when you’ve
had more time to consider. We all know students—again, the less vocal
ones—who take longer than others to formulate what end up being very
insightful comments. Social media in the classroom gives these students a
different avenue and a different temporality for presenting these
viewpoints.
b. It also gives the entire class a way to continue discussing the course
material, whenever someone wants to. You no longer have to depend upon
being in the same place at the same time to learn.
c. Twitter as a way to reach me.
d. Digital office hours, accomplished via IM
e. Wikis
i. My favorite social media assignment uses a wiki.
ii. A wiki is a tool that allows multiple people to edit a document and
to track the changes made to it.
iii. For each day of class, I assign a small group of students to write
notes—a summary, key passages and terms—and publish them on
the wiki.
iv. Suddenly, group work is much less painful thanks to the
technology. They don’t have to be in the same place at the same
time.
f. Summary…and it keeps them thinking about my course material
4. It provides students with transferable skills and toolsets that they will use after
completing university.
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a. How to write clearly and persuasively is perhaps the most important
thing I teach students in my literature classes. So writing is good.
b. But if they also know how to write online? That’s better.
c. Writing online—blogs, tweets, wikis—is an important skill for this
century. I want my students to have other abilities that will distinguish
them when they meet with employers.
d. One of the ways I accomplish this goal of teaching new skills is through
an interactive timeline assignment.
e. Timelines, Google Docs, and HTML
f. It’s not only particular tools or technologies that matter, it’s skills.
Working in social media teaches the students how to collaborate on a team
(wikis)—something that humanities classes in particular don’t teach by
default—and how to behave in a networked environment.
g. Summary
5. The fifth (and last) reason to use social media in the classroom is that it opens the
classroom to the world.
a. How often have you heard students ask, “Why does this matter?”
b. Because social media tends to be public, classes that use social media
open themselves to participation from the wider world. From other
students.
c. You can also bring guests into the classroom using Skype. These guests
can include other scholars, authors, or maybe just native speakers of the
language your students are learning.
d. Alternatively, assignments can ask students to engage with the wider
world. Many of my friends who teach political science or film assign their
students to write new entries for the Wikipedia. They contribute to the
world’s wider knowledge and it’s suddenly clear why what they’re doing
matters.
e. And because social media is open, it’s something we can capture. We
generate our own record of what we’ve learned. This record can be of use
to students in the future. It’s something that they can show to other people
(parents?).
f. Summary: And in this sense, it opens the classroom and the learning
experience to the larger world.

Conclusion
• So there are five reasons to use social media in the classroom. Even with those reasons,
you might still feel nervous about its inclusion.
• But just remember…
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• We’re ALWAYS been social. We use a profoundly social space in our teaching—the
classroom—, and being social is how we’ve always been excellent. It’s certainly a trait of
those who are being honored this evening.
• Just because we’re already social, however, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try
supplementing our classroom with something new, like social media. The reasons for
using social media in the classroom are so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth the
experiment and the risk of becoming uncomfortable for a short period.
● It is possible to have teaching excellence and social media in the same classroom.
● We just have to be willing to become students again ourselves.

Thank you.