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.