Presentation for Academic staff on the issues around using social media in learning and teaching, with some suggestions for creative use

1. Using Blogs and Social Media for
Learning and Teaching
Dr Helen Webster

2. Question:
Your experience with Social Media
Do you use social
media of any sort?
(personally or
professionally)

3. Learning Outcomes
At the end of this session you will:
Anglia Learning and Teaching
Inspiring Academic Excellence
• Understand the characteristics of blogs, wikis and other social media
• Understand how they clash with or complement the aims and values
of academia and education
• Think creatively about how they might be used effectively in teaching
and learning
• Identify some of the issues that arise when integrating social media
into teaching and learning, and strategies to address these issues
Webinar: Using Blogs and Social Media for Teaching and Learning Dr Helen Webster, Dec
2013

4. A Clash of Two Cultures
Question:
What annoys/
irritates/frustrates you
most about your students’
use of Social Media in their
Learning?

5. Clash of Two Cultures
Academia
• Teacher-created, student
consumed
• Large scale broadcast
• Authority, one-to-many
• Final, authoritative version
• Closed, determined
• Individual lone scholar
• Plagiarism, possession of ideas
• Academic Text (some images)
Digital, Social Media
• User-created and consumed
‘produser’
• Small scale narrowcast
• Peer, many-to-many
• Early release, perpetual beta
• Open, emergent
• Networked, collaborative
• Frictionless creation and
sharing
• Multi-media, multi genre

6. Are we confusing form with function?

7. Synergy of Two Cultures
Digital Social Media
• User-created and consumed
‘produser’
• Small scale narrowcast
• Peer, many-to-many
• Early release, perpetual beta
• Open, emergent
• Networked, collaborative
• Frictionless creation and
sharing
• Multimedia
Education
• Student as active partner in
learning
• Tailored, personalised learning
• Collaborative, constructivist
• Assess process, not product
• Dynamic, creative curriculum
• Peer learning
• Capturing and sharing learning
• Multimodal learning

8. Digital Technology
Are we talking about…
• Using technology to enhance how
we teach, learn and assess? (do
things differently)
• Reviewing how and what we
teach, how and what students
learn, in a world which is altered
by technology? (do different
things, flip the classroom!)

9. Characteristics of Social Media
• Web 2.0 – participatory, intuitive interface
• User generated, narrowcast content*
• Networked and shared, many to many
• Dynamic
• Open, emergent use
• Mobile
• *Content:
– Multimedia (including text)
– Metadata and curation
– Edits and comments

10. Digital Openness
Think creatively…
Affordances and technological determinism
VS
Emergent, creative use in tune with digital culture and good pedagogy

11. Definitions: Blogs
• “Web log” or diary format
• Chronological posts, discrete entries
• Hosted (often free or fremium) on a platform
such as the VLE, Wordpress.com Blogger,
Tumblr

12. Question:
• Do you read blogs?
• Do you write a blog
yourself?

13. What can a blog do?
• Allows one or more people to post to it
(individual blogs, shared blogs)
• Allows different privacy settings (private, specific
audience, open)
• Enables others to comment on posts
• Allows metadata (tagging, categories, time etc)
• Enables you to collate, link to, embed and reblog
material
• Allows you to edit and delete posts
(Any questions/observations?)

14. Blogging genre conventions
• A blog is NOT an online journal article or essay; it
is a different genre with different writing
conventions:
– Snappy title (will also be URL)
– Conversational, personal tone
– ‘Shorth’ – 600 words (1000 MAX and RARELY)
– Hypertext links instead of footnotes and references
– Multimedia – embed images, video, sound, slides,
documents…. Could even be a vlog!
– Scannable – no large blocks of dense text
– Comments generally invited

15. Types of blog (post) which might be
relevant for education
• Reflection
• Update
• Report on event
• Review or critique
• Commentary
• Curated materials with annotation
• Instructions and tips
• Listicles

16. Question:
What uses for a
blog can you think
of in your teaching
and learning?

17. Using Blogs in Teaching and Learning
• Assessment
– Formative – assess the process not product
– Summative – a different genre with more
authenticity and situatedness
• Reflection
– On professional practice
– On academic practice
• What else…?

18. Definitions: Wikis
• A single webpage or website which multiple users
can add, edit, modify or delete openly
• No single ‘owner’ or ‘leader’ (administrator
manages the system, not the content)
• No structure or conventions – this emerges
• Relies on community to moderate, review, correct
and improve
• Possible to view the revision history to see who
did what, and revert to earlier versions
Any questions/observations?

19. Other social media
• Making (and sharing) media: video, audio,
infographics, photo, visualisations, text,
presentations, screencasts, animations….
• Social and user generated: social networks,
discussion forums, blogs, wikis, comments,
quizzes and questionnaires…
• Information Curation: cloud filesharing, social
bookmarking, content curation and metadata, e-portfolios,
push and pull (search engines, RSS
feeds, subscriptions)
• Virtual presences and places: virtual worlds and
games, video conferencing, Virtual Learning
Environments, webinars…

20. More ways to use Blogs and other
Social Media in teaching and learning
• Networked peer learning
– What do students create?
• Notes from lectures
• Notes from reading
• Verbal and other contributions in class
• Activities for deepening learning or revising
• Assignments and peer feedback…?
Can they share their content or collaborate on creating it?
Can they use multimedia rather than text?

21. And even more ideas….
What do you create as teacher?
Assessment
design
Curriculum
Presentation
materials
(Annotated)
Reading lists
Guides and
Handbooks
Handouts
Assessment
criteria

22. Some ideas….
Bibliograwiki
• Discussion forum/Twitter suggest search terms,
likely formats and databases, crowdsource
suggestions
• Mendeley/Delicious Collate and curate a reading
list, tag with metadata
• Wiki Summarise and annotate reading list
• Blog Critique articles/books
• Wiki Synthesise debates and trends

23. Some ideas…
Hack the Lecture
• Wiki develop the curriculum and keep it updating throughout
• Twitter/Discussion Forum Crowdsource questions and topics
to cover in module/lecture
• Powerpoint/Dropbox students research and create a slide
each
• (Lecture, using student-created slides) Looking things up on
mobile devices
• Blog/Twitter/mindmap software Liveblog or livetweet the
lecture
• Wiki/Storify lecture notes into a collaborative version
• Youtube/lecturecapture/Audacity Student-edited clips of the
main points of the lecture (audio/video)

24. Some ideas…
The social assignment
• Wiki/discussion forum Students suggest and discuss
assignments, materials and assessment criteria
• Blog: Students select assignment, and blog weekly progress
– reflection and/or drafts:
– Question analysis
– Essay plan
– Search strategies and reading notes
– Rough draft
– Revised draft
– Anticipated feedback
– Response to feedback
• Students share exemplars and annotate

25. The Importance of Lurking
(aka Legitimate Peripheral Participation)
Novice
Expert
See Lave and
Wenger, (1991)
Wenger (1998)
• Analytical consumption
before active production –
social media as source
material
• Limitations of this model
in this context

26. Getting students on board
Access and
motivation
Online
Socialisation
Information
exchange
Knowledge
Construction
Development
5-step Model of e-learning
Gilly Salmon

27. Digital Natives? Or Digital Divide?
“11- 16 years olds… have high
levels of access to Web 2.0
technologies…little evidence of
ground breaking activities and only
embryonic signs of criticality, self
management to metacognitive
reflection”
“Whilst most expressed an interest in using in using online
technologies to support familiar school activities, such as
presentations or for communication, learners seemed
cautious about other activities associated with Web 2.0
tools, such “
as the shared construction of knowledge in a
public format”
Luckin et al 2009

28. Faces
academic student
social
professional

29. Spaces
• VLE?

30. Ethics and Legality

31. Graduate attributes, academic
literacies, employability
Digital Literacies defines those who exhibit a
critical understanding and capability for
living, learning and working in the digital
society JISC 2013 JISC 2013
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-students-
digital-literacy

32. Further help
Further reading:
Anglia Learning and Teaching
Inspiring Academic Excellence
• Robin Mason and Frank Rennie (2008). E-learning
and Social Networking Handbook: Resources for
Higher Education. New York and Abingdon,
Routledge.
• Karen Kear (2011). Online and Social Networking
Communities: A Best Practice Guide for Educators.
New York and Abindon, Routledge.
Webinar: Using Blogs and Social Media for Learning and Teaching Dr Helen Webster, Dec 2013

33. Anglia Learning and Teaching
Inspiring Academic Excellence
Contact Anglia Learning and Teaching
Call: 0845 271 2639
Email: lta@anglia.ac.uk
Web: www.anglia.ac.uk/lta
Author(s): Dr Helen Webster
Version: 0213
Anglia Ruskin
University, 2013
Any part of this presentation may be reproduced without
permission but with attribution to
Anglia Learning and Teaching and the author(s)
CC-BY-SA (share alike with attribution)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Webinar: Using Blogs and Social Media for Teaching and Learning Dr Helen Webster, Dec 2013