Successful Use of Various Social Media In A Class

July 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Ronald A. Yaros, University of Maryland

Summary Of A “Hybrid” Course Devoted to Technology and Social Media

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address “new problems” facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This “hybrid” course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams. [Read more...]

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How To Integrate Social Networks And Blogs Into Traditional Curriculums

May 29, 2010 By 1 Comment
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By Keith Quesenberry, Temple University

Introduction

Social Media is growing and changing the way we live, the way we do business and the way we connect. The latest numbers indicate that in December 2009 the social network Facebook surpassed 100 million active users in the U.S. and over 350 million worldwide (Smith, 2010). Blogs are, well, everywhere. The latest number I could find was in 2008 when the Blog Herald reported that there were roughly 200 million blogs (Helmond, 2008). Since then it seems people have given up counting. Even CEOs are blogging. Sun Microsystems CEO Blog gets 400,000 hits a month (Balwani, 2009). Bloggers are now legitimate media gaining access to and asking questions of the President at Whitehouse press conferences (Baker, 2009). And Facebook has become large enough and influential enough to draw fire from U.S Senators over its privacy settings (Patel, 2010).

Social media is here to stay and will only further infiltrate how we socialize, conduct business and learn. But how do we integrate emerging Web 2.0 technologies into an established, traditional university curriculum? [Read more...]

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Social Media in the Classroom: Tips from a Millennial Professor

May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Jennifer Edwards, Tarleton State University

As a professor from the millennial generation, I hold social media to a high regard in my undergraduate communication classrooms. To incorporate social media in the “Foundations for Speech Communication”, “Organizational Communication”, and “Interpersonal Communication” courses (averaging 25 students), I combined my efforts to create opportunities for different classes to interact with one another (and the campus) through social media. To reach the students in my online and face-to-face classes, I decided to incorporate Twitter and Youtube as experiential activities.

Twitter Embedded in Blackboard

On our campus, we use Blackboard as a content management system for online and hybrid classes. Recently, I discovered that I could embed widgets (java application) into the main course page. I added my professional twitter account username [name of account] to the widget and this enabled my students to remain abreast of course updates and to have more of a social presence with their professor. In addition, the students had the option to follow me on twitter [@accountname] to ask quick questions and to provide short updates on their daily life. [Read more...]

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