Group items tagged

George Veletsianos is a faculty member/researcher whose work focuses on online learning, including social media. Perhaps worth a follow.

This article discusses how Americans use Twitter and relates to our Week 3 discussion about lurking.

I am an invisible learner on Instagram. I have never posted on Instagram, but just like some of the posts. :-)

I'm definitely a lurker when it comes to Twitter.

Reynol Junco is a faculty member/researcher who focuses on social media. This is his blog. 

Good on you for just contacting him! I've yet to meet him, but have (obv.) read his work.

Cool Blog! Thanks for sharing. I wonder why the above link says to his blog says 0 views, I clicked on it and went to the site, so that should be at least one view! I am also assuming Abigail clicked on the link too, although she may be already ready following the blog since she already a fan of him!

First in a series on setting up your own MOOC (or any other course, really) using google and related tools.

I think the articles are great, I looked at a few of the parts. Nice descriptions and screenshots. I haven't asked this before, and maybe I should know this but what are the RSS feeds? I have ignored them because I didn't know what they were. Since part 2 tells me how to add them to my site, I wonder what they are.

Thank you very much for sharing this, Vanessa, I'm going to try it, it seems like a great platform to use. Fran, basically if you want to follow a blog or a website and don't want to check every day if there's something new published, you add this blog/website to a feed reader (I use Google Reader) and see all the new posts of the different blogs and websites published on the same page. This is (more or less) a RSS feed. Such a great help for managing information!

This article is long however it gives some great information about using YouTube in the classroom. It is divided up into a few chapters so not all of it needs to be consumed. In short it is a research study about how educators use the web2.0 tool YouTube. It talks about how we can integrate it in the class, features of the site, and how to use the site. It also highlights some of the problems that came up with usage during the study.

Awesome! I love YouTube and I definitely utilize this tool A LOT in my high school English classroom. I enjoy how youtube also has the ability to focus on strictly educational materials. Visuals are so important for students to create concrete connections. Great artice!

YouTube is my favorite video-based network. Videos are intrinsically motivating and engaging. I agree with the point in the article that the videos that are informative, humorous, current, interesting and engaging are most preferred by students, but instructors choose a video based on its instructional value, not simply due to its humorous content. The article entirely and detailly introduces the tool. Additionally, the following article is also a great material to learn YouTube. Duffy, P. (2007). Engaging the YouTube Google‐Eyed Generation: Strategies for Using Web 2.0 in Teaching and Learning. In European Conference on eLearning, ECEL.

This article describes a high school teacher's yearslong journey in introducing and managing Twitter in her classroom. She begins with this observation, "Students participated more readily when the tools they already used outside school were acceptable in the classroom," and then goes on to describe how she made school constituents comfortable with her adoption of the platform. This is followed by the actual ways in which she used it (announcements - sharing articles blogs - classtags - extension of class discussion- digital citizenship - Tweetdeck). She addressed one of my questions about her choice to use Twitter, sharing that it was the unreliability of the LMS that led her to use Twitter from sharing information at first, but over time, she observed many benefits such as clarity in writing through the mandatory economy. Even after the expansion to 280 characters, only 5% of tweets were longer than 140 words! One powerful takeaway was the experience of a long haired male student who had the experience of being listened to without judgment. Twitter in her experience allowed for marginalized voices to be heard.

In this article, two Australian researchers investigated whether Twitter can be used to foster enhanced student engagement within a university level sport marketing course. 68 students participated in the study. 59% of the class did not have an existing Twitter account and had to sign up for one to participate in the study. There were two aspects of Twitter user during the course. First, students would participate in two discussion lectures, which was structured much the same as a Twitter chat, with questions posted in advance of the actual discussion. The second aspect was to regularly post contemporary issues in sport marketing that coincided with the course content. Much like EME 6414, students used a hashtagged course code to be able to track the activity and respond to their classmates. I thought it was interesting that the researchers explicitly advised existing Twitter users that they did not have to censor their regular Twitter activity, as the instructor would only follow the course hashtag. This appears to be a clear acknowledgement of the potential for context collapse when social media is incorporated into an educational setting. Questionnaires were administered to broadly measure aspects of student engagement. The results suggest that Twitter was effective in the university classroom as engagement levels increased over the semester. Twitter made it easier for students to connect with both the instructor and other students and extend that connection beyond the lecture time in the classroom. These networking tools also allow students to take on a more active role in the co-creation of the course content. I think this is one of the most significant advantages of incorporating social networking elements into the classroom. The biggest limitations of the study were its small sample size and homogeneous population. Future studies should include more students from various disciplines.

It took me a very long time to find the comment button to add another thought to my original post. Not nearly as noticeable as other discussion platforms. Anyway...I wanted to add that this article was very appropriate right now because the TA for EME 5608 is currently conducting research on a very similar topic, specifically "when and how social media apps like Instagram are used by students (without instructor participation) to support social interaction and build social connections in online courses." I know some of you are also in that course and I'm curious what your opinions are on the experiment? Do you think that interacting on Instagram has increased your social connections and added benefit to the learning experience?

It also took me a long time to find the comment button! You are not alone in that!

Coincidentally, some library colleagues and I are trying to implement this into FSU. We hope to find a department interested in using all OER textbooks. It seems like a challenge, but we are confident that if one school will jump on board, students will encourage others to follow their example!

This is an excellent share. I have never heard of this, but I am now looking forward to Week 5!

What a great resource!

This is a beginner's guide to social media analytics. This article covers what social media analytics are, common social media platform analytics (and what they are called, ex. Facebook can be found on "Insights tab", and steps on how to track analytics.