25 educational uses of Twitter

From Sonja Cole - at TechLearning.com. Sonja recently (June 4, 09) wrote a short article listing 25 ways one could teach with Twitter. It’s more like 25 ways  you could use Twitter in education. There’s not much pedagogy involved here. Still, some of these might evolve into something useful for your classes so I’m passing her suggestions along anyway.

http://www.techlearning.com/article/20896

Maybe Twitterverse users with …

Maybe Twitterverse users with large following move to community Nings when number of followers and activities are self-sustaining

Noticed jump from personal blo…

Noticed jump from personal blog use to Ning communities for some bloggers. At what stage does this happen? Like going straight to wireless?

Twitter microsharing lecture

Twitter microsharing master recent lecture - Google vs. Twitter talk - http://bit.ly/7afvI

Getting beyond the obvious…

In a recent Campus Technology article on mobile technologies- July 2009 by Mary Grush, John Ittelson - formerly of CSU Monterey Bay and Jim Wolfgang, of Georgia College and State University, among others made some comments re technology planning and use that should become the focus of discussion  in faculty curricula and technology planning committees across campus.

Don’t let technology drive your plans - Colleges should “identify their challenges or opportunities first” instead of  starting with the “coolest device and then figure out how to do something with it”  (Wolfgang, p. 24).  Too often faculty feel compelled to implement a new tool such as Facebook without thinking about how the technology will help students achieve their learning outcomes.

Seek out real change - Colleges for the past few decades have used technology to reinforce existing pedagogical structures rather than “embrace the new technology as a genuinely new form of engagement with students” (p. 26).  Ittelson further stated that “we haven’t really changed the way the disciplines are taught in academia, even though mobile media could substantially impact that and better reflect the ‘real world’ discipline and the way we engage students” (p. 28).   And as a result, at most colleges and universities we’ve seen no significant difference in learning when technology is employed except in those instances where the pedagogical structure has also been changed, e.g., collaborative activities, case studies, simulations, etc.  What Ittelson neglects to mention is that colleges sometimes feel constrained by articulation agreements which demand comparability between e.g., “online classes” and on campus ones.  This type of problem adds to the concern that faculty have about making drastic changes in course design.

These are just a few of the major points made in Mary Grush’s article.  In California, we should be looking at the our current financial crisis as a challenge and opportunity to examine our organizational structures such as:

• class size
• role of the teacher
• role of the student
• tutor’s or grader’s role
• instructional technologist’s role
• the physical or virtual makeup of a classroom

Some of these items are already being discussed in the K-12 area and through virtual communities such as Classroom 2.0.  California community colleges need to be as nimble as possible to respond to our electorate and students.  Our challenge will be overcomming our reluctance and inertia in coming up with solutions that support our mission before running out of credit.

Elluminate - Real time interaction in Moodle

For those of you who haven’t done much exploring in Moodle recently, note that you can now add an Elluminate activity to any weekly or topical center block in Moodle. You can set the dates of availability and restrict user access to a single student or make it available to the entire class.

Like the other human presence tools in Moodle, you can’t set up an Elluminate activity as a graded one except for attendance. When you set up the activity you can set a point value and later when you mark attendance after the event the point value goes into the gradebook. Note, students either get all the points or no points for the activity. An alternate approach is to not set a point value in the activity and enter a score manually in the gradebook for the activity.

Elluminate has most features that other virtual classroom applications have.

• You can upload any type of file, share it, use a highlighter on it, and save the results as an image file for later review.
• You can also upload a powerpoint presentation to give a lecture.
• You can link to websites, chat with students, and share applications or windows on your desktop.
• All of the presentation and interaction including your voice can recorded and archived for later viewing.

Elluminate works well with most browsers I’ve checked except it requires a java applet to run and you must accept a web certificate since our SBCC instance of Elluminate runs on one of their servers.

If you’re interested in experimenting with Elluminate OR you want to review their online archived tutorials, you can access them for free at http://elluminate.com/support/training/index.jsp. Select the link for the recorded moderator training for version 8. The Elluminate folks also sometimes do free web demos if you want a real-time demonstration.

Some typical educational uses of Elluminate include:

• application training
• question and answer review
• e-lectures
• small-group meetings

As I find more specific uses of Elluminate in instruction,  I’ll post them here as case-studies for our campus faculty.

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.

Twitter Updates for 2009-07-02

• final check from twitter to blog. Interesting, having to write very concisely. Maybe just
  point people to longer blurbs may make it useful #
• Checking out the autotweeting from my blog to twitter… #
• Found twitter plugin that allows me to post my tweets to my blog and vice versa - thanks to Alex King at alexking.org #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

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….

Peer Instruction update and clickers

For those of you who remember our presentation re clickers in ITC, one of the early primary researchers in this area was Prof. Eric Mazur. He now apparently has a social networking site trying to build more interest among educators particularly when it comes to using tools in the on campus classroom to improve learning…

Here’s a short article based on his book - Peer learning. This one is at his social networking site… http://www.turning-talk.com/mazur/article-intro-jun09