Operational

Pedagogy

Can the system support your institutional aims and processes?

Is the system applicable across broad contexts?

Can the system support assessment processes?

Is content private, secure, and owned and controlled by the user?

What support is available to assist implementation, use and maintenance of the system?

Are you confident in the longer term availability, viability and continued improvement of the system?

back-channel conversations

While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter

Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.

A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.

Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.

Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.

Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."

"students were using Facebook to increase the size of their social network, and therefore their access to more information and diverse perspectives. "

"Powerful new technologies provide great benefits, but they also change the way we live, and not always in ways that everyone likes. An example is the spread of air conditioning, which makes us more comfortable, but those who grew up before its invention speak fondly of a time when everyone sat on the front porch and talked to their neighbors rather than going indoors to stay cool and watch TV. The declining cost of information processing and communication represents a powerful new technology, with social networking as the most recent service to be provided at modest cost. It can be expected to bring pluses and minuses."

social networking technologies support and enable a new model of social life, in which people’s social circles will consist of many more, but weaker, ties

Social networking technologies provide people with a low cost (in terms of time and effort) way of making and keeping social connections, enabling a social scenario in which people have huge numbers of diverse, but not very close, acquaintances.

Costs

Teaching

Interaction

Organization

Novelty

Speed and Security

“The key is, whatever model you choose, think about the technology choice before designing the course,” said Bates. “Too often instructors get halfway through the course and then start making decisions about the technology when that should have been thought about at the beginning so that it can be properly integrated.”