Full
disclaimer: I do have a FaceBook page
(that I check a couple times a year…) but beyond that I admit that I pretty
much limit my web-based communication to email. I’ve never felt compelled to “tweet” anything
(which for all I know is now so yesterday, anyway) or use whatever else may be
the flavor of the day in the apps world.
This semester,
though, one of my students on the first day of class asked if he could collect
everyone’s cell phone number to set up a “Group Me” class chat. A bit reluctantly, I gave my
cell phone number and waited to see what would happen.
Not surprisingly,
I got a lot of “how u doin” and “boy Im tired” types of messages, ones that I
just glanced at and hit Delete. But
gradually I began to see a real purpose.
One obvious use is as a place where a student can ask a general
class-related question and I can answer right away, so that others don’t have
to ask the same question. (While I was typing this, a student texted to ask if Moodle was down and I let her and
others know that it was fine at Lincoln’s end, while another student suggested
a workaround.)
Perhaps even more
importantly, though, I think it’s a motivational tool. Early this morning I was getting ready to
head to campus when one student texted, “Good morning, wonderful people.” A few class members chimed in with similar
greetings. While I was too busy getting
things together so I could get on the road to write anything, I drove to school musing about how nice it was to have students thinking positively about class and
classmates first thing in the morning and thinking that it would be an
interesting research project to see if class satisfaction and course
completion/persistence correlate at all with that sort of casual media use.
Do any of you
have examples of constructive use of social media, whether formally for
instruction or informally? While I may
be too old to use them, I’m still young enough to be curious!
