social media
in higher education
Trebor Scholz
Eugene Lang College
scholzt@newschool.edu
last update: March 28, 2009

media
Trebor Scholz activist
Internet Studies, Media Education, Art, Activism
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writer er
educa
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creat
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confe
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artist

•Right now
Student Twitter poetry slam competition
(followed by booklet)
In the classroom
(Free software, Seesmic, Slideshare, SMC, blogs, wikis,
video essays
Zoho, Screenflow, podcasts, video casts, live streaming)
Guest speakers via Skype or Seesmic
LibraryThing: Cataloguing party with students. Reference personal library of faculty online
Social media dash board to bring together social web presence of college in one place
Official Flickr stream and dedicated YouTube channel
(photo gallery of all people at Lang)
Live stream and archive large university lectures
Twitter for administrative purposes: Twtpoll (quick feedback from students)
Twitter account to tweet all Lang events
(calendar as twitter stream)
Students connect through Twitter, Flickr, Netvibes
(i.e., freshmen with seniors, alumni with current students)
•Mid-term
Faculty and students micro-blog
create directory and feature on website
•Long-term
Open Access: Invite faculty to make their syllabi and all of their research available to the public

What can we do right now?

social media?
publish
share
discuss
microblog
livestream
livecast
blogs
explore virtual worlds
use social networking services and social
games
graphic created with wordle.com

http://globalnerdy.com/2007/07/23/kids-say-email-is-only-for-talking-to-the-man/
Through social media we can make our classes more relevant to the interests of students by
engaging with their everyday fascinations and obsessions.

Seesmic
Podcast
Twitter Games
Tweetworks
Virtual Worlds
Yammer
Delicious
Flickr
content in many places Facebook
How findable is our content?
YouTube
Does it reside in places where students gather?
web page culture
Blogs
Social bookmarking
Wikis

http://community.livejournal.com/loltheorists/tag/foucault
Linking everyday vernacular to academic scholarship

Poetry Twitter Slam
a socially networked student competition
•publish booklet of entries on Lulu.com
winner of the
twitter poetry slam
competition
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evandagan/3283259916/

In the classroom
Learning to work as peers in public
Educating authors for the networked age

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/we-have-a-winner/
video essays

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F66qju9N0SE&feature=related
http://videoessays.tumblr.com/
UC Irvine course about YouTube on YouTube
Liz Losh (UC Irvine)
editing, very engaged and engaging, dialogical writing situation
Fostering practices aimed at public writing and semiotic mobility and thus
encouraging sensitivity to new questions about authorship and audience
-Liz Losh

22 Short Films about Grammar
http://www.bunkmag.com/grammar/

http://sharewidely.org/
tool to share and collaboratively build syllabi

Profcast to record lecture slides with audio (video casts)
ScreenFlow to record computer screen (segments of DVDs, screen interaction)

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=579416073383&ref=mf
Open Office Hours on Facebook
“Instructors set aside a few hours each week for students to drop by for conversation. These conversations
can cover anything from a review of course content to the latest research findings or career advice.”

video discussion of readings and hosting of guest speakers with Seesmic

http://librarything.com/
http://www.librarything.com/profile/trebor

Cataloguing
Book cataloguing parties in faculty’s houses

Social networking sites for groups with Ning

http://socialmediaclassroom.com/
several tools in one interface

Pro: Con:
Threaded private Twitter conversation too many casual replies-
Messages limited to 140 characters misunderstanding of discussion as instant messaging

http://creator.zoho.com/trebors/articles/#Form:Participation_Literacy
credit: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=202
Reading and sharing a large number of articles in preparation for class (thanks to Michael Welsh)

students submit summaries of a large number of articles through Zoho: the class ends up getting an overview of a large
number of texts

http://www.noahwf.com/
faculty and student research blogs

http://gamesforchange.org/
http://q2l.org/
http://seriousgames.org/

http://imlbeta.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/tempestentrance.jpg
Multi-user Virtual Environment for Learning
Games and virtual worlds as “gateways” to parEcipaEon literacy that foster collaboraEve problem solving
“Games can also be used by instructors to understand what it's like to be a novice in a deep, complex system of unfamiliar
signs and signifiers.” ‐ Alice Robison

http://www.googlelittrips.org/
Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place.

OpenOffice.orgis a GIMP is the GNU Image
Instructorʼs Resources Tweetdeck takes an
multiplatform and multilingual Manipulation Program. It is a
http://delicious.com/Trebor/ abundance of information from
office suite and an open- freely distributed piece of
Twitter i.e twitter feeds, and
source project. Compatible software for such tasks as
breaks it down into more
with all other major office photo retouching, image
manageable bite sized pieces.
suites, the product is free to composition and image
download, use, and distribute. authoring. It works on many
operating systems, in many
languages.
Audacity is free, open source VLC Plays more video files than
Firefox The award-winning Miro is the free open-source
software for recording and most players: Quicktime, AVI, DIVX,
Web browser is now faster, video platform.
editing sounds. It is available OGG, and more.
more secure, and fully
for Mac OS X, Microsoft
customizable to your online
Windows, GNU/Linux, and
life. With Firefox 2, weʼve
other operating systems.
added powerful new features
that make your online
experience even better.

Twitter
uchicagolaw: “Twitter allows us to give prospective students a bite-sized glimpse into what life here is like.”
selected from: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2009/01/04/chronicle_hlp.html#comment52073

Feature Twitter faculty address directory on College website
• Chat with your professor or other students after class
• Collaborate on a project. Start a conversation thread.
• In-class back channel
• Follow the tweets of professionals
• Share your teaching resources beyond the class room

•Learn what people say about you and join that conversation
•Find experts in your field on Twellow.com or Twitter Search
•What do people think about your organization?
•Twitter as possibility for creating intellectual community.
•Organizational: quick way to point to problems.
•Of course, it only works if people make an effort to use it.
http://messageboard.chatuniversity.com/eugenelang/
Twitter could enhance live chat service

What is my colleague writing, reading,... right now?
What are her research interests?
What can I learn about him or her?

Use a Twitter stream to announce events
http://www.newschool.edu/lang/events.aspx http://
Twuffer allows the Twitter user to compose a list of future tweets and schedule their release.
You can tweet hourly/daily/monthly announcements.

http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

http://twtpoll.com
invite quick feedback from students
twtpoll.com

https://www.yammer.com/
private twittering in the organization
$1 per employee per month

Who is telling the story about your university?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/metmuseum/3266695469/sizes/l/in/set-72157613529457517/

-Hand out upload details to very many people
(authorize with Flickr so that people can email
photos from their phones)
-Create a gallery of people
at your college

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uchicagolibrary/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/unmflickr

http://www.youtube.com/user/SwarthmoreCollegePA
Set up YouTube channel and document most events

http://www.google.com/talks/authors/index.html
recording small events without complicated setup, inexpensive

tweetgrid.com

Pull all college-related content together in a social media dash board Netvibes
Social Media Dash Board

http://friendfeed.com/uwgb
Friendfeed

http://www.mogulus.com/thefutureofnews
Live stream and archive large university lectures Harvard University live cast of the Future of News course
tools: Ustream, Mogulus

http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/

Long term:
Open access to all research and syllabi
Gradual approach: Encourage faculty to publish lectures publicly

Most of our content should be available to all.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
MIT faculty open access
to their scholarly articles
March 20, 2009
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/open-access-0320.html

http://trebor.blip.tv/file/1829726/
http://davidharvey.org/
Video cast of lectures on blip.tv,
Podcasts: record public faculty readings as well as other public lectures and make them publicly available

slideshare.net

http://firstmonday.org/ http://ijlm.net/
open access peer reviewed journals
experiments with new models of peer review

Q&A
Concerns Considerations
conversations are happening anyway
student stories can provide a human, unfiltered image of the institution
Loss of control
it’s expensive to monitor, edit
Information overload/
Just pick two or three tools that make immediate sense to you.
overwhelming
Start with work/study students and a working group of enthusiastic
Time commitment
faculty and staff.
Not every institution has the resources of MIT to clear the copyright for
Syllabi: copyright issues
all material appearing in syllabi. Openness comes at a prize.
What is the value of working in Some kind of public practice is required in all professions. Working in
public? Should not students edit, public is a necessity. Learning to work on the mentioned platforms helps
edit, and re-edit before stepping students to establish a literacy of tools that they will still use once they
into the limelight? graduated.
What is the point of investing The suggestions in this presentation are not bound to specific tools. These
time and energy in technologies educational practices could easily migrate from one tool to another, from
that may be obsolete at the end one service to another and you simply move with the technologies. This
of the semester already? is why committing large resources to one platform or tool, especially if it
is exclusive to educational settings, makes little sense. Our content should
be where students spend most of their time online.

Summary
Tools, Services, Practices

Facebook Pages, LinkedIn social networking service
Blogs blogging
Ning.com social networking, media sharing
Twitter micro-blogging
Tweetworks: Twitter threaded conversations
Tweetworks
Flickr photo
YouTube video, media sharing
-YouTube only short video
Viddler.com
-Viddler allows private video, large files
Blip.tv
-Vimeo- large files, bad for slides, great for live video
Vimeo -Blip.tv high quality large video possible
Tumblr
Delicious social/bookmarking
Seesmic video conversations (asynchronous)
Profcast video casts/podcasts
Slideshare sharing
Seesmic conversation
Zoho collaborative writing
Google Reader RSS
Technorati Search
PbWiki wiki
Voicethread audio and video conversation (asynchronous)
Skype video conversations (synchronous)
hOp://seriousgames.org | hOp://gamesforchange.org Games as “gateway”

Trebor Scholz
scholzt@newschool.edu
Twitter: trebors
Blog: http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms
Delicious: http://del.icio.us/trebor
Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/treborscholz
LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/profile/trebor