Group items tagged

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!

Great research article on Web 2.0 tools and student learning. From 2013 so fairly recent - Aditi Pai, Spelman College Jim Stenerson, Pace University Michael Gaines, University of Miami Introduction It is well documented over the years that technology has impacted education and changed the landscape of teaching and learning. For the most part information technology has been credited with making teaching and learning an active and engaging process for both the students and the faculty (Redecker et al 2009).

Download full PDF from FSU Library database. Students from American College of Norway, the University of North Dakota, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa came together through technology with the objective to have engage in a dialogue on topics such as like world peace, sustainable peace and global citizenship. Students were using this as an opportunity to connect to one another. Students were excited for the opportunity to engage, they had exposure to great speakers (digitally) and materials. They were connected to one another via online channels. Students answered questions on a blog and on Facebook, and although at first the answers may have been surface level, eventually student answers became more sophisticated. The study concludes by acknowledging the value of studying abroad, but recognizing that not all students have the opportunity to do so. Some of the value of study abroad is the exposure to culture and enhanced desire to learn, with technology it is possible to help students develop a passion for learning and create a sense of understanding for global issues.

Purdue has developed and deployed a large suite of digital technologies designed to improve student success. They developed this tool - Mixable, that enables informaiton to be delivered though a mobile device, Facebook application, or web browser. All these technologies are designed to connect the classroom with the class using the connections and devices common to students such as dropbox, video/image sharing tool, etc.

Here is the game I used for my assignment this week. Warning: it's really addictive.

Mobile Moodle app moving to HTML5 more... Upcoming MoodleMoots around the world more... 1st Moodle Research Conference - September 2012 more...

I have checked out Moodle before and have read articles that seems to favor this over Blackboard. However, even though its free, it may be a challenge for some universities to switch over. The hidden costs are high.

I used Moodle for several years at my former school, in Spain. It's a great LMS, not too different from Blackboard. It's free but, at a school level you still have to have an IT department for the maintenance, or pay an external administrator. If I were a principal, I would choose Moodle over Blackboard.

I don't know much about Second Life, and while it might have some elements that I could do without, I was thinking that this could tie nicely into a formal or informal Web 2.0 learning platform, game based learning, and Produsage. What do you think?

Second Life creeps me out too. I've tried exploring what it is, but I think it just boils down to me thinking that I would have to be dissatisfied with my first life to indulge in a second one. There was a season of The Office devoted to this, I think. It also doesn't help that the only Second Life example I have ever seen was the one that shares the thoughts and visuals of a schizophrenic and that the graphics look like the Grand Theft Auto video game (one that my little brother played WAY too much). I know all of what I just typed is silly (although true for me) because some really great things are coming out of Second Life. I have a friend who is working on her doctorate in ISD at the University of Southern Alabama, and she put a lot of work into a research on using Second Life to rehabilitate long-term prison inmates, prior to their release. She ultimately chose another topic for her thesis, but her work showed astounding results. Before learning about her work, I assumed Second Life was nothing more than a glorified Sims game.

To some degree, I agree Denise that its a little creepy. Especially since there are a lot of undesireable elements (at least to me) that seem to permeate the S.L. landscape. However, I am fascinated with using a virtual world setting to encourage learning because people tend to "get in to it" better when its in an environment that they can relate too.

You could say there's a universe of ways people measure the ROI from their social media marketing. Some of the more popular methods, like counting Facebook "likes" and re-tweets, have very little meaning to the CFO, while other newly developed formulas around engagement can be, well, rather creative.

Tagging because I want to read it, but thought some of you might be interested as well.

Interesting piece. I've heard lots about the debate over scholarship versus service, and thought that Bessette's analogy to blogging as service was fascinating. Knowledge sharing may not be scholarship in the traditional sense, but it certainly plays an important role in pushing higher education forward, so maybe it should be considered a real part of a scholar's contributions to the field.

I know some bloggers who are actively lobbying to consider their blogs as scholarship. Some have submitted archives as part of promotion dossiers. Generally, they're not at R1 universities -- although there are plenty of R1 scholars who see how blogging and other social media interactions can enhance their scholarship via promoting their work and building their networks. And many have also talked about the effect it has had on their writing. I think I'll blog about that sometime in the next week.

In this article, researchers created a MOOC focused on assisting professors understand and apply the Carpe Deim design method to designing their own courses. In addition to using the LMS Blackboard as the vehicle for MOOC publishing, facilitators were interested in studying the effects social media had on MOOC participants. MOOC facilitators used Facebook and Twitter as the two main social media platforms. Facebook was used to ask questions, seek help and discuss issues. Twitter was used to share information and resources and participants were encouraged to share their thoughts and experiences using #CDMOOC. Upon completion of the MOOC, Facebook was the most used site compared to Twitter. Out of 1000 MOOC participants who were surveyed at completion, 29 agreed to be further interviewed about their social media engagement; half used at least one of the social media platform revealing "the most used form of social media was Facebook (used by 31%), a small minority (3%) used Twitter only, while 14% of interviewees utilized both Facebook and Twitter". Three themes that emerged from the study related to MOOC and social engagement revealed three themes. One, social media did enhance online collaborative learning for participants. Two, the ability to engage with diverse knowledgeable professionals was enjoyed by many participants. Three, main objections why participants did not engage with social media include a belief it may be a waste of time, unfamiliarity with platforms and identity concerns.

Were you able to share your annotations because it was a web version of the article rather than the .PDF? I tried to do that with mine but couldn't get it to work.

Tess (2013) provides a great review of the literature on the role of social media in the higher education context. Tess (2013) suggests that as instructors look for ways to incorporate technology to mediate and enhance their instructions as well as promote active learning among students, they increasingly turn to different social media tools. The author argues that the current literature on the integration of social media in higher education are limited to self-reported data and content analyses. Therefore, he provides a summary of literature on the role of social media in the higher education classroom as well as discusses their limitations. Various studies (cited below) explored the role of social media and SNSs in different contexts of education -teaching learning process. These studies have demonstrated interesting and useful results. Tess (2013), in addition to keyword-specific searches, used a "snowball" method for finding the articles from the relevant articles cited in the literature reviewed. To narrow the range of the review, he chooses articles on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blog and LinkedIn. Tess (2013) provides a brief definition of each of these five SNSs. He also looks at the social impact of these popular SNS tools. The author looks at the factors motivating the educators to use social media in higher education classrooms, such as: the changing nature of the student, the changing knowledge consumption relationship, and the de-emphasis of institutionally provided learning and emergence of "user-driven" education (Selwyn, 2010). The author provides platform-specific affordances and drawbacks in terms of their application in the higher education space. Tess (2013) argues that although the infrastructure to support social media's presence exists in most universities today, instructors have been slow in adopting the tool as an educational one. Those who are adopting are still likely in the experimental stage. He admits that his literature rev

While we have already moved way past this, I still thought this was a very well put together explanation for getting started on Twitter from the University of Leicester and may be useful for future classes!

This is a great basic explanation of Twitter! I could see us providing this resource to students that may be new to Twitter before designing a class activity with it.

The step by step instructions on how to develop a presence are great. Don't often see that. I like the encouraging tone of the piece. Thanks!

"Jean M Twenge Ph.D" discusses how research presented in Adam Conover's YouTube video "Millennials Don't Exist" was misrepresented and how she and Adam were later able to discuss their differing viewpoints rather than bash each other on social media as many would have.

I wish more people could debate that way! I agree that not everyone wants to discuss- some just want to argue and be heard!

Thanks for sharing! Twenge has had to defend a lot of her literature on generational studies. I read her iGen book before and the criticism she's received on that topic as well. Very interesting!

I like the section on "curating vs dumping". In a previous course, we used Zotero to store our sources for annotated bibliographies and for classmates to have access to. I did not fully utilize this resources by tagging, sorting, etc. In this case, I just used this site to 'dump' all of my sources and then didn't do anything else with them.

This is a useful resource! It makes me realize that I subconsciously used a curation tool in one of my courses (one I am a very minor instructor actually). During the session, I was presenting some tips to help healthcare professionals to see how useful mastering English could be for their job (I'm the French classmate, remember. ;-) ). I decided to combine all the resources I provided about the TOEFL test, Visas, universities, and so on, in a shared Padlet everybody could implement. Though I thought the comment feature could be helpful, I relied on colors to categorize the various topics. I think including tags would be super helpful to provide multiple ways to classify resources.

"What is an Open Educational Resource?"

The bookmark provides a great infographic to recall the benefits of Open Education Resources. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks for sharing! I appreciate the highlights and annotations.