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A Framework for Teaching with Twitter

A Framework for Teaching with Twitter
Faculty are increasingly experimenting with social media, and it’s exciting to find more and more courses incorporating Twitter, a ProfHacker favorite. Just last week on ProfHacker Ryan provided an excellent introduction to Twitter, while earlier in the summer Brian reflected on his use of Twitter in the classroom during Spring 2010. As we gear up for the Fall 2010 semester, I wanted to revisit the idea of teaching with Twitter. I’ll address my own pedagogical use of Twitter in a future ProfHacker post, but for today I want to share a general framework for Twitter adoption in the classroom, originally sketched out in late August 2009 by Rick Reo. Rick is an instructional designer at George Mason University, and he’d been keeping tabs on the different ways instructors were using Twitter in their teaching. Rick sent a draft of this adoption matrix to the university’s Teaching with Technology listserv, and I soon began trying to situate my own Twitter use on the chart. How about you?

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-framework-for-teaching-with-twitter/26223

5 Tools for Building a Next-Generation 'Hybrid' Class Website [Nicholas C. Martin is a visiting professor at American University and the United Nations University for Peace. He is also co-founder and president of TechChange, an organization that trains leaders to leverage emerging technologies for sustainable social change. How to Start Tweeting (and Why You Might Want To) We’ve written a lot about Twitter here at ProfHacker. George hosted a discussion of Twitter at MLA 09, Brian urged us to hack conferences using Twitter, Julie taught us how to use Twitter clients and handle Twitter spam, Ethan explained how to back up our social networks, and Jeffery even showed us how to post a Twitter feed on our office doors. A few weeks ago, however, I was visiting a friend and fellow teacher who asked a more basic question: “so how would I get started with this whole Twitter thing?” Her question was a good one, and we haven’t really answered it here yet. One of the most common dismissals of Twitter sounds something like this, “I don’t need to know what a bunch of people had for breakfast.” My response to this is always, “if that what you’re seeing on Twitter, you’re following the wrong people.”

The Social Compass is the GPS for the Adaptive Business Brian Solis inShare286 Over the years, I’ve written extensively about the need to extend opportunities in social media beyond marketing and customer service to set the stage for the social business. I believe that the impact lies beyond the socialization of business; it introduces us to a genre of an adaptive business, an entity that can earn relevance now and over time by listening, engaging, and learning. In October 2009, I worked with JESS3 to visualize corporate transparency and authenticity for the release of Engage. » Twitter is a Snark Valve SAMPLE REALITY Last week I described the intensive role of social networking in my teaching. Although I explained how I track and archive my students’ Twitter activity, I didn’t describe what they on Twitter. That’s because I wasn’t sure myself what they do. I mean, of course I’ve reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn’t considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about.

Rubrics for Assessment Online Professional Development - UW Stout, Wisconsin's Polytechnic University Learn more about our Online Courses, Online Certificate Programs, and Graduate Degree A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, group work/cooperative learning, concept map, research process/ report, PowerPoint, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other social media projects. Quick Links to Rubrics Social Media Project Rubrics epic shit there Last week I introduced a pedagogical framework for using Twitter in your teaching, organized along two axes: monologic to dialogic and passive to active. These high-falutin terms are fine for a theoretical matrix, but what about the real life implementation of Twitter in and outside of your classroom? How do you actually do it? I’m going to leave behind the pedagogy (mostly) in this post, and instead offer some practical advice for teaching with Twitter. I’ll cover six aspects of Twitter integration where it pays to plan ahead of time (i.e. sometime last week): organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment. I’ll deal with of each of these areas in turn, but before I do, and if you’re new to Twitter, I want to urge you to read Ryan Cordell’s comprehensive ProfHacker primer on Twitter.

Professor tries improving lectures by removing them from class Personal narrative plays an important role in Mike Garver’s teaching style. Garver, a professor of marketing at Central Michigan University, often uses anecdotes from his own life in his lectures, according to one of his students. “It’s a good way to, in his words, ‘Put a movie in your mind,’ ” says Mike Hoover, a senior at Central Michigan, who is currently taking Garver’s course in market research. So when I ask Garver about his efforts to excise the lecture from the classroom and blow it to smithereens, he naturally begins telling me a story. In this one, it’s 1998, and Garver is fresh out of grad school and into his first teaching job, at Western Carolina University. He’s giving a lecture on “the principles of marketing” to 100 students.

Social media is more than simply a marketing tool for academic research According to Jeff Jarvis, author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, thanks to the internet, "we all have our Gutenberg presses and the privileges they accord." For academic institutions, the internet is a largely untapped resource for shaping and sharing scholarly research. As with the Gutenberg press, maybe professors are worried about permanently penning their ideas into cyberspace. Others may worry about privacy, especially regarding social networking.

Teaching with Twitter: how the social network can contribute to learning I am senior lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton and have been an advocate for the past few years of teaching using blended learning - integrating online learning activities alongside face-to-face teaching. Two of my courses on Victorian literature feature a number of assessed online discussion forum activities. They get 100% participation - much of it enthusiastic. Online learning spaces are neutral - just like a 'real' classroom is. It's what you do in them that matters. I use face-to-face classes as a spur to take our study of any given topic further online, thus extending it into areas of reflection and research not possible within the constraints of a seminar discussion.

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