Tag: social media

Who Will the Students Follow on Twitter?

NCTE_Twitter
The idea is that my students will follow tweeters within a topic that interests them. This worries me in that I’m sure I’ll have lots of Yankee fans who will automatically want to follow the team’s outfielder and frequent tweeter, Nick Swisher. I don’t object to students following Swisher, but as far as the class goes, I want the students to ask themselves a few questions:

  • Why am I a student at St. John’s?
  • What am I interested in learning about?
  • What are my intellectual curiosities?
  • What’s my plan when it comes to the reading and writing I will do in this class?

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Given those questions, who do the students think they should follow? If the student aspires to be a Yankee beat reporter, then maybe Nick Swisher is perfect. If the student hopes to work in finance or publishing, perhaps they should find someone else to follow.

Take for example a former student of mine who is a speech pathology major. While getting ready for a panel discussion, she and I happened on wondering about putting “speech pathology” in the Twitter search box. Among the screen full of tweets that contained the phrase from the past few hours of tweets, we saw a posting by a speech pathologist about a job opening in her office. This is not the first time a student and I have stumbled mostly by accident onto something that works well. When this happens, I try to take notice and organize an environment where this good thing is more likely to happen. Because of this particular moment with a student in my office, I want to have students identify tweeters in their area of interest and see what they find. I know they will find something. Maybe more of them will find leads on an internship or job opportunity.

I know from experience that when I tweet and read tweets, I find many teachers using technology in interesting ways. I imagine if I was a basketball coach, I’d find coaches tweeting about game strategy. Well, I don’t have to imagine too hard: St. John’s University’s own Coach Lavin is a regular tweeter. I’m confident that a student writing about studying abroad could find other students tweeting about a similar experience. Do you see any potential problems with this? Do you have ideas of your own for using Twitter in the classroom?
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My Top 5 Movies, Ben’s, and a Request for You to Vote

Changing your life, going to grad school, entrepreneurism, and all-time favorite movies are the topics this week. I’ve got a new partner, Ben Atkinson, a former student of mine from over ten years ago. After a stint as a molecular biologist, Ben went back to school for an MBA in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from Indiana University. He also started his own web company, Night Phoenix Enterprises, which hosts this site.

Ben and I discuss the movies briefly and arrived on a list of four for you to vote on.  Vote on the movie you’d like to hear us discuss.  We’ll let you know the results of the poll just in case you want to watch and weigh in with your thoughts too. The poll is in the right sidebar–>
Ben and I each choose our Top 5 Favorite Movies:

Ben:

  1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  2. Jurassic Park
  3. Back to the Future
  4. The Life Aquatic
  5. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
great book, 80s, Love on the Big Screen, hilarious, William Torgerson
photo from mashable.com
Torg:
  1. Say Anything
  2. Wonderbodys
  3. American Beauty
  4. Secret Window
  5. High Fidelity
Johnny Depp suspense story Heaven Forbid novel gripping William Torgerson
“You Stole My Story!”
from rottentomatoes .com

 

To close the show, Ben and I each gave some shout outs to culture we have been enjoying.

Ben and I hope you’ll comment/criticize our movie choices and tell us about your own All-Time Top 5 Movies.  I feel like revising my choices already.

Until then, in the words of Bill and Ted…

“Be Excellent to Each Other”

 

 

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Using Twitter in the Classroom to Facilitate Discussion

Using Twitter to Enhance Discussion in the Composition Classroom

I started with Twitter in the spring semester of 2012. I invited students to create accounts so that we could use them along with classroom discussion. We talked about privacy and potential problems with going public with writing, and I told the students that they might have a good reason for not wanting to use social media. One student shared a horrific story of Facebook identity theft and harassment. I also noted that I sometimes consider abandoning my online life, and that I’d enthusiastically support any student who wanted to skip the social media component of the class. We all, I thought, would benefit from some powerful voices warning about the dangers of being too digitally connected.

Twitter, NCTE, discussion, social media, pedagogy

Even though I was worried that there would be students who would see my offer as a way to get out of some of the classwork, all of my students signed up for Twitter.  I think there were less than five who already had an account.  One or two of the students had internships during which it was their primary job to Tweet and write Facebook posts.

Here was my starting place: in addition to doing our regular, go around the room, sharing to begin each class session, the students would also Tweet a highlight of what they planned to say.  So the idea was that students would listen to the one or two students who talked AND at the same time, Tweet comments to the class or as a “reply” to one particular student.  I thought of this as a kind of transparent note-taking process.  It used to be I’d write down golden lines of something someone said or jot down a question I had for later, but with Twitter, these notes could instantly be put up on the screen for everyone to see.  Maybe we’d see from the Tweets that many writers were gravitating toward the same lines from our reading, or that the writers in the class had some of the same sorts of questions. For example, if more than one student didn’t understand what I meant when I said student work should strive for “intellectual ambition,” perhaps our discussion could dig in on that feature of my expectations for their work.

In the coming blog posts, I’ll share how my idea worked, what I learned, and what I plan to do differently in the Fall of 2012. If you’ve used digital texts in the classroom, I hope you’ll join in the conversation.  Have you thought about how social media might impact classroom communities? Have you used Twitter in your classroom? If this article interested you, I hope you’ll consider signing up for periodic updates by typing your email in the upper left hand corner of this page.  Thanks!

 

Google+ for You?

In November, I presented at this conference called the Blogworld & New Media Expo.  They have what is called a virtual ticket, and I’m working my way through some of the sessions and taking notes.

Google+ Torgerson

Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki did a presentation on Google+, a social media platform (is that what you call it?) that I’ve largely ignored until now. I set up my profile. I know a couple of good friends are on there.  I check in to see what they’ve posted lately.  That was about it.

Guy says Facebook is for friends and family and Google+ is for those who share your passion.  He says the first thing I ought to do is to search for key words that describe my passion.  Okay, item learned #1:  I can search for key words on Google+.  I can’t do that on Facebook, right?  So I try searching by “writing” and “teaching” and what do I find?  TENURE-TRACK POSITION IN CREATIVE WRITING (FICTION) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH DAKOTA.  It was the second post.  I hadn’t thought about job openings being on Google+.  It would be a certain kind of writer and teacher to find such a post on Google+ as opposed to the pages of The Writer’s Chronicle, right?  Some universities would never post on Google+ and some would most want to find future teachers and writers there.  That’s my guess.  Got an opinion?

Chris says you can click into your circles and just see posts from that circle.  So I could have a “writing” circle and a “basketball coach” circle and take only a look at those things when I want to.  He also says to try  FindPeopleOnPlus.Com.  There, you could not only search by someone’s name–William Torgerson–but also by key words such as “writer.”  Chris says he found 87 farmers.  He plays Texas Hold’em with his dad on Google+.

There’s something called Hangout where you can get together online via video.  I can see possibilities for writing groups or classes to meet virtually. Okay, I’m convinced to do more on Google+.  Maybe tonight I’ll take a look at organizing my circles.

You can read more about Guy Kawasaki here.

And Chris Brogan here. 

Are you on Google+?  If you are, what do you do there?