Using Social Media and Web 2.0 for Higher Education

I'll be doing a dry run this Friday for a new training session I am working on for faculty at the University of Delaware. I'm trying to collect as many faculty practices around the use of social media, including free web 2.0 tools like social bookmarking, video streaming, etc., in the context of course support, in-class, hybrid, or pure distance.

I have already found some examples, but it seems like I have a hard time finding higher education ones (or at least education ones in general). So here's my current list:

• Hotseat at Purdue University. This Twitter-like application lets students ask questions and vote for the ones that the Instructor should answer.
• The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas. An experiment by Monica Rankin, Professor of History at UT Dallas.
• Roosevelt High School's Use of Social Media. The focus of this video is to demonstrate how student engagement is key to success.
• Diigo - 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading and Collaboration. A post about why Diigo is a good tool for education.
• Ustream for sick student: Just a Tweet I saw today that made me realize how easy it is to let an external audience attend your live event.
• Lynnette Claire on Student Entrepreneurship Videos. Students film a short documentary about a local business and share it with other students and community members at the end of the semester.
• Using a Flip Video Camera in the Classroom. This instructional video explains ways to take advantage of a low-end video camera for use in the classroom.

I will modify this post to add relevant examples, but basically, I think social media and web 2.0 resources can be used in multiple ways to enhance student learning. Different tools will serve different purposes, like collecting, commenting, discussing, doing mashups and remixes, immersing, creating, archiving, etc.

Please share any good examples I should consider for my workshop as comments below, and I will share them back in this post. Make me proud of my personal learning network so I can brag about how you guys rock! ;-)

UPDATE: I have created a tag in Diigo/Delicious to keep track of these examples and the new ones I will find: http://delicious.com/mathplourde/SMPracticesTraining

I also recorded the video of a brainstorming session about the content of the final workshop and used Wallwisher to move stuff around.

Managing Filter Failure

This blog post is a follow-up to Liz and Lisa's awesome workshop at Educon 2.2 (January 31, 2010).



This should be no surprise to anyone who knows me even remotely: I like social media and I like to try new shiny toys on the internet. I try to spread the joy as much as possible about my discoveries, because I'm a Sniff (that's a "Who Moved My Cheese" reference)...

But every now and then, I hear this:

• I don't know how you do this, you must not have kids I suppose...(I don't)
  
• There is just too much information, I can't follow all of this...
• My e-mail is already out of control, and now you want me to use what?

Yes, I admit it, there is quite a lot of information out there. And finding the right one for you is a daunting task. And doing it day after day is, well, tiring.

How Big is the Problem Anyway?

 

Do we really understand how big the internet is... This clever infographic demonstrates the scale of the damage.


Created by Online Education

And then, think of it this way: If you get cable or satellite television at home, you probably have access to roughly 150 channels of continuous programming. This means that if you wanted to watch all programs on all channels (excluding reruns), you would need 150 hours every hour.

The point here is that you have millions and millions of information channels competing for your attention, but, as a normal human being, you can only tune in to one channel at a time.

So I guess everybody else is right, and there's no sense in even trying to absorb it all! Even if you would spend all your days reading and learning, at the end of your life, you will have been exposed to only a grain of rice in the universe of knowledge, and you would be falling behind even more at every instant.

My Social Media Inventory

 

Beyond just letting go, there must be a middle ground to try to get exposed to the right information. A couple of months ago, I decided to create an inventory of my social media tools and strategies. Although it might look like a lot, all of these tools are just a part of my routine now.

At the heart of my social media strategy is social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is probably the activity that I do that has the most value to me, and projects the most accurately my professional persona. Below is a diagram of my discovery and sharing workflow.



I have created a chain of events that happen every time I find something relevant on the internet. Everything that at the left of me is what I call my "Personal Awareness Network" (that's the new term I just coined to refer to what I consciously expose myself to by subscribing to it). Whenever something finds me and catches my attention, I start reading it, determine if this is something I need to read in detail, try to find a paragraph in the text that summarizes the content and highlight it, click the Diigo bookmark button in my browser toolbar, enter the relevant tags, and hit save. This simple action triggers everything on the right side.

Am I cheating my followers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? Not really, since they have decided to pay attention to my stuff. They opted-in to my social stream, the same way I have opted-in to the stream of others. Anyone annoyed with my behavior is allowed, no, hold on, INVITED to unfriend/unfollow me. That includes Facebook, yes. Don't make your life miserable because of me.

I don't really read everything I bookmark, I get myself exposed to it and save it for future reference. If your labeling strategy is efficient, you should be able to retrieve a lot of the articles you have been exposed to using this technique, even as your list grows bigger and bigger (I have almost 3,000 bookmarks in Diigo - try fitting that in your browser's favorites just for fun).

My Learning Style

All of this thinking about my use of social media got me reflecting on how I learn. I am not the type of person who remembers everything word for word. I use to hate reading for the longest time because the only time I read when I was young was when I had to study for an exam. I always feared that I would forget something, so I read, highlighted, and re-read everything to be able to regurgitate enough information on my exams to get a good grade.

Now, I read to make myself aware of stuff. I am not afraid to forget details, since details are a couple of keystrokes away, stored in my personal knowledge base, safely backed-up and available on the web, away from my potentially virus-infested PC.

I believe my mind is like a sponge. Once it gets full, it drips. The smaller chunks (information and data) drip away, and the bigger chunks (wisdom, experiences, knowledge) form patterns and clusters of assumptions, attitudes, and values that can guide my behavior when faced with familiar and new situations in life.

Remembering everything is plain utopia. The cloud does it better than you, so don't fight it.

Selecting Your Channels

 

As Chris Anderson exposes it in Free, when it comes to information, I embrace waste. If I stumble upon an interesting blog post or article, I usually look for the profile of the writer and look for the RSS orange button to add the feed to my Google Reader. If the blogger hit a home run on the article I have read and doesn't follow-through with new good ones, I simply unsubscribe. I also always try to follow them on Twitter, look at the people they have conversations with, follow them, etc.

Even if I'm a thousand articles behind on my Google Reader, I don't panic. I read whatever catches my attention, and go with the flow. At some point, I mark everything as read and move on. If something is important enough, it will find me again, because I have set my personal awareness network that way. I'm doing my best in making my grain of rice as pertinent as possible for my own professional development needs.

Technology only does a part of the filtering. This whole opt-in strategy is fine to do the first rough pass, but your real filter is in your head. Any learning is good learning. My advice: Don't let the hugeness and absurdity of the universe of information prevent you from at least trying.

Filters can also be people. As you learn new stuff, you can always bounce off the information with a colleague you trust to get their view on it. That is something Liz explained about her relationship with Lisa during conferences, and I think that's a pretty decent practice.

And What About the Outbound Information?

 

So far, I have only exposed how I manage inbound information. That's great, because I can develop my own self, but what about my colleagues and friends? I find stuff daily that my colleagues should be interested in, yet I don't share everything with them. This is a tricky and sensitive subject, and here's why: opting-in is a personal choice. This means that I can't push too much information to my colleagues, I have to respect their choice. They might have other ways of developing their skills, and nagging by sending them links every day will not help them feel compelled to establish their own personal awareness network.

And then ask yourself: Would you follow yourself? With the quantity of web artifacts you leave online, can you expect anyone to pay attention to every little detail? You also have to be a filter for your colleagues.

One strategy is to accumulate resources just-in-case someone asks for it (I grabbed that one from Beth, who I did not know before and happened to be sitting right next to me). If you know that your boss will someday be interested in [insert topic here], then start tagging your links with his/her name, or a tag that is unique and makes sense. When the time comes and that he/she pops the question, send a link to the stuff you have tagged for that occasion. That will make you look smart ;-)

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So, what's your strategy to manage filter failure? Please share your ideas and experiences by commenting to this post!

A Serendipitous Social Media Story.

You know how we always think of the Internet as a web of facts that are interconnected to one another? Well, here's a story of random interconnected stuff that led me to step out of my comfort zone. Warning: This blog post jumps from one thing to the other a lot.

About 2 months ago, I finally got rid of my dino-phone (circa 2007) to make a leap into 2009 and bought a Motorola Droid (I know, the Droid is SOOOOO 2009). I have been enjoying my new smartphone a lot since I got it. I don't usually play around with computers and social media, preferring to do productive stuff with them (I have a PS3 at home to play after all), but one silly thing I have been playing around with is Foursquare, a new location-based social application.

I must admit that I don't really use Foursquare for anything serious, and definitely not to meet drinking buddies (although I would have enjoyed that back in my college days). I just like tagging my surroundings and racking up stats about my whereabouts. I aspire to become the Uber-Mayor of Newark, DE, but some local users are taking this way too seriously for me to be a contender...

Since I don't know many local folks using Foursquare, I became friend with my various conference geeks. Foursquare has a feature to see where your friends have recently checked in, but I rarely pay any attention to it.

On a Thursday night, finding myself slightly bored because my wife just left for Europe (she recruits international students to come learn English in Delaware), I took a look at my friends' list, just for fun. I noticed the following information next to Alec C's avatar:

Alec C. @ Fogo De Chao

... which got me thinking. Alec C. is Alec Couros, a Professor of Education at the University of Regina who's social media expertise is so deep that he's making a living out of it. Alec was our keynote presenter at our last Summer Faculty Institute.

Since my wife travels so much for her work, she racks up frequent flyer miles like crazy, so I accompanied her last September for one of her student fairs in Brazil. Brazilians are very big on fire-grilled beef, and they have all-you-can-eat restaurants called Churrascarias, where the meat comes to you until your belly explodes. Anyway, I went to Fogo De Chao in Sao Paulo, so I got even more curious. Could Alec be in Brazil?

Then I clicked on his avatar and figured out he was at the Philadelphia's Fogo de Chao. So I direct messaged Alec on Twitter to understand why the heck he was in Philly and not freezing his butt in the Canadian Great Prairies.

He told me he was in Philly to attend Educon starting on the Friday night. Having no idea what Educon was, I googled it and found out about it. It seemed like a decent education conference, but with a strong focus on K12. After a couple of back and forth messages on Twitter, Alec said he would keep me in touch of any social events so I could join him to catch up.

Friday night arrived, and I left work pretty late. I saw that the opening panel discussion was streamed, and I didn't pay too much attention to it, but Twitter was on fire! Tweets tagged with #educon kept coming left, right, and center, so I guess I did know a lot of people attending this conference after all. I thought to myself: "Who's crazy enough to attend a conference that happens during a weekend anyway?"

My Saturdays are always extremely lazy and unproductive. This one was not exception. I kept an uninterested eye on Twitter to see if Alec would send me a message about the plans for Saturday night. We finally figured out that Educon folks were to gather at a place called Rembrandt's in Philly at night, so I decided to just drive there for the evening, packing the bare essentials just in case I had to spend the night anywhere, since it was snowing and i would need to drive back pretty late (Philly is 45 minutes from my house on a clear day).

So I drove to Philly to meet Alec, and ended up meeting a bunch of my friends on Twitter, bumping contact information and bouncing ideas about education and technology. At that point, I realized that even thought educon was K12-focused, the people there made the conference, and spending my Sunday there would not only be beneficial, but also fairly entertaining!

So I made sure I could register with Chris Lehmann, the conference organizer and driving force behind the Science Leadership Academy, a kick-a** high school in Philly where students are actually motivated and learning real-life skills, and then checked in the Windsor Hotel to spend the night.

The next morning, I showed up and registered for the conference's last day.

So what's the lesson in all of this anyway?

I think the lesson in this chain of events is that surprising stuff can happen now that we have a location-based layer over social media. Beyond only being aware a conference was happening somewhere, I now knew where it was, and could manage to get to it for some awesome spontaneous conferencing.

The other lesson is that technology and real-life are now so interconnected that they are becoming harder and harder to decouple. Is that a good or a bad thing? I believe it is a good thing, since social media is opt-in all the way. Alec decided to share his location and to friend me, I made a conscious decision to have a look at Foursquare. It just seems to me that my serendipitous discovery potential has now gone up significantly, and expanded to the meatspace!

And, of course, I found a use for Foursquare ;-)

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As a follow-up from Educon, I will blog at least twice after this post, so be sure to subscribe!