By Kelli Burns, University of South Florida

Today’s tech-savvy student generation is actively participating in social networking and other online communities, so most students not only understand how to use Web 2.0 teaching tools, they thrive in the environment when Web communication solutions are integrated in the classroom.—K. Driscoll, 2007, p. 10

Social media tools can enrich a research methods class by providing students with a way to collect data, share research, and monitor online conversations. At the beginning of the course, students create their own blogs using WordPress and then throughout the course, use the blogs to post reports, photos, videos, and podcasts. The five social media assignments that have been assigned in this course are described below. These assignments include (1) a social media monitoring project which asks students to monitor social media sites for conversations about a client; (2) an ethnography project where students collect data through photographs that are posted to a photo-sharing site; (3) an interview project where student create MP3s of their interviews and upload them to their blogs as podcasts; (4) a focus group blog project where students collect data on a blog over several days; and (5) a survey project requiring students to create a video and an online survey. [Read more...]