More on using Facebook

Here’s a short PDF doc by mpstaton@gmail.com on Using Facebook in Instruction. It’s a little dated as the interface for Facebook and classes/courses app has changed but it’s still worth the peek.

http://org.elon.edu/catl/conference/documents/FacebookEducation.pdf

More on Facebook and instruction…

As I promised, here’s an update to my sense of using Facebook (FB) as a course management (CMS) tool.  If you don’t know it, in 2007, it appears that FB dropped development of its course management system leaving it to outside developers to improve its functionality and add features.  The results in my opinion at this time are mixed.

Teachers or really anyone can add a course in Facebook.  Of course, you must have a FB account in order to do so.  Your students MUST also be invited to join the class though you could certainly leave it open to the world…  Teachers or owners of the class can post assignments, links to other website, post announcements, and even have non-threaded
discussions.

But unlike other course managment systems, content does not roll over necessarily from one term to the next. This means a teacher would have to complete a pre-course setup each and every term for each course she’s teaching in FB. It appears you can’t even reset dates for assignments in current term if the due date has already arrived.  Only UPcoming assignments are visible on the main class/course page though students can search for past assignments.  You would have to recreate  an assignment if you wanted to change it.

Next, something that teachers generally take for granted is student enrollment.  Students are not automatically added to a course. You have to invite them which means they have to have a Facebook account.  So plan on helping at least a few of them navigate their way particularly when it comes to restricting who sees what in their profiles.  And let’s face
it, most teachers don’t want to be the technical HELP DESK for students when it comes to application support.

My sense is that FB may be more designed for teachers who are adding course materials and activities on the fly.  It may still be more suited for social or student activities such as keeping track of former students.  I’ll continue to keep an eye on its development but wonder about its viability compared to other CMS.  There have a lot of folks reviewing FB as
a teaching tool like Professor Nicole Ellison at Michigan State University-

http://nellison.blogspot.com/2007/12/ecar-facebook-as-teaching-tool.html.  Here’s an older review of FB she wrote.  It’s a bit dated but still relevant as some of the same issues she raised still exist.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna take a different approach here to see if students are using FB for academic classes in an umprompted manner, i.e., setting up their own informal structures to share course materials, study for classes, set up tutoring sessions, etc.  There may be more to it than the obvious. And like before, as I find more, I’ll post it here.

Facebook help link is http://en-gb.facebook.com/help.php

Twitter and instruction

Twitter has certainly gained more popularity as a microblogging tool from the recent outpouring of tweets disputing Iran’s political election results to meteorological storm chasers like Rick Sanchez of CNN of the past few years.

So, educational technologists like myself ask what pedagogical structures can make use of Twitter. Well here are some obvious examples:

1. Class Field trips - Teachers and students can report and share their preliminary findings from the field of a predetermined set of research questions. These tweets can be posted to a course blog or a Facebook site where students can later add more detail as well as share their findings with other students.

2. Expert in the field- A teacher or researcher in the field can answer questions from students in classes regarding their findings in the field. The teacher and students can work together to generate questions to send to the researcher who can respond as data are collected and initial findings are recorded. An example that comes to mind… The Space Station and class interactions that have already taken place. With some planning and coordination ahead of time, teachers can make arrangements for authentic classroom activities.

3. Student Mobile reporter - Students can use Twitter to report “local events” to a class blog site. Of course, teachers should be cautious in assigning activities that might put students at jeopardy for any reason such as “junior” storm chasers.

Now, if you’re just getting started with the mechanics of Twitter, you can always tinker with the tool. However, I recently purchased a book re Twitter basics, something I generally don’t do, because technologies like Twitter change so frequently. The book I purchased covers a lot of the basics including newer tools like Tweetdecks which is a Tweets aggregator of sorts.

The book is titled “Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tweets,” by Paul McFedries. You can purchase it at a local bookstore or via Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/mg2uo3 for around $20 list price…

As I find and come up with other uses of Twitter and instruction, I’ll be posting them to my blog.

Initial thoughts re instructional use of Facebook

Facebook, like other social networking tools, at this point in time may offer more social uses for networking than instructional uses in the classroom.

Here are some common educational uses:

• as a means of connecting with current and former students
• provide links to content on the WWW or your own content if you create your class via the apps option
• simple communication tools for announcements or non-threaded discussions within your class
• provides the “experience” of multi-user instant messaging with easy integration of users’ resources stored elsewhere in popular public sites like Flickr and YouTube.

If you’re thinking of switching from a learning management system like Blackboard to Facebook, you should know that Facebook offers little control for those teachers who want to constrain when students submit work.  Facebook which is more of a Web 2.0-3.0 tool is attractive to  those individuals who tend to care less about having clearly defined classroom boundaries or instructional sequences.

From my experience, first-time Facebook users are learning the app more by trial and error than reading the Facebook HELP or the manual (if there were one) before going public.  Consequently, they’re likely to GET FRIENDS they hadn’t counted on and may have later trouble separating friends from classmates.  But then maybe, that’s the point.  Facebook’s POV is to ignore the old Classroom 1.0 structure in favor of a new model that defines a class differently in terms of who’s in the class, how people collaborate in the class, and what even gets learned in the class.

Until then, I’ll have to continue experimenting the rest of the summer with the Facebook classes app to see how it compares with the tools already in place at our college.

More later to come….

Experimenting with an MP3 player

Isn’t about time that Wordpress users had an easy MP3 flash player that they could use in their posts and comments? Well, here is 1PixelOut, by Martin Laine. It only received 3 out of 5 stars so I’m hoping that the product will improve but so far it’s been a breeze to use. The example below is from an

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Getting tired of looking thru Web 2.0 sites

Here’s a link to AppAppeal a site that catalogs and reviews web 2.0 software.

Some of my favorite free Web 2.0 tools

— brainstorming

http://bubbl.us/

– to do lists, project management

http://voo2do.com/

http://zamzar.com/

– FREE online storage space

http://www.mediamax.com/index.aspx

– Near-Free web flowcharting

http://www.gliffy.com/

– FREE online database

http://creator.zoho.com/

http://furl.net

Here’s a link to Jim Wenzloff’s PDF guide to using FURL in the classroom.

Using Pod/Vcasts in Instruction

Given the fact that many educators using technology tend to replicate activities online that they conduct in the on campus classroom, and the lack of emprirical evidence supporting the use of Ipod- like devices to improve learning, it makes sense that teachers employ teaching strategies and techniques that have some proven ability to influence learning.

So, rather than record an entire 60 minute or so e-lecture for ItunesU, I recommend that teachers lean towards brevity, e.g., less than five minutes in length and use a technique such as advanced organizers to provide a framework for the content to be learned based on students’ prior knowledge because one of common problem students have is seeing the relationship between former content presented and content to be presented in the next lesson. Advanced organizers serve as a framework for the content to be learned based on students’ prior knowledge.

Advanced organizers generally take on two forms. They are comparative organizers and expository organizers. Comparative organizers form a bridge between new and old “familiar” content by comparing and contrasting new ideas with content previously presented. Here’s a common example. If a teacher were to give a lecture about an atom’s structure, the teacher could discuss the similarities between the electrons circling a nucleus of an atom and the moons orbiting a planet. Expository organizers set the stage for new concepts and information by giving students a general framework that becomes the basis for new content.

Here’s another common example. Before introducing students to the structure of state government, have students recall the structure of the federal government of which they may already be familiar. The expository organizer acts like a bridge between old familiar content and new concepts and information to be learned.

The publication and theory of advanced organizers is generally credited to David Ausubel (1960). Ausubel (1960) argued that in order for meaningful learning to occur, students should bring to the learning situation what they already know. The teacher’s job is to provide an introduction or framework that helps the students mentally organize their thoughts “before” being introduced to the details of new concepts.” Ausubel (1963) also argued that “advanced organizers were different from overviews and summaries which simply emphasize key ideas and details in an arbitrary manner.” Rather, he suggested that advanced organizers act as a “subsuming bridge” between new learning material and existing related ideas (Ausubel, 1963). Advanced organizers have been shown to be effective with students of all abilities and grade levels but especially with students of lower ability (Luiten, J., Ames, W., & Ackerson, G., 1980). For more teaching tips, see our SBCC teaching tips database.