Ning — AEJMC Hot Topics

Integrating social media into the classroom: resources, readings and lessons learned.

By Gary Ritzenthaler, University of Florida, Ph.D. Student/Instructor, @gritz99

Introduction

At the 2009 AEJMC Convention in Boston, I presented a paper (written with David Stanton and Glenn Rickard) entitled, “Facebook groups as an e-learning component in higher education courses: one successful case study.” (See the paper here or presentation slides here.) The paper described a study we did in 2007 regarding students use of a Facebook group as a course component. That 2007 study, in turn, grew out of my experiments in building social media websites for a college audience, undertaken as a part of my master’s degree on social media, completed in 2006.
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How To Integrate Social Networks And Blogs Into Traditional Curriculums

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...]