Using Social Media Effectively in the Classroom

Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, and More

Kay Seo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415896795
• eBook ISBN: 9781136235399
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The rapid expansion of blogs, Twitter, wikis, and virtual worlds has dramatically transformed the landscape of education. Through highly accessible networks, these new media can integrate students into a learning community by enabling them to create, customize, and share content online. Using Social Media Effectively in the Classroom shows educators how to:

• utilize social media to best support learners
• resolve potential problems
• create a powerful sense of community within user-centered Web 2.0 technologies.

Moving beyond basic explanations of technologies and how to use them, this book provides research-based, jargon-free, practical examples of what works, what doesn't, and why when it comes to social media. Organized according to the systematic process of instructional design, contributors describe innovative strategies for incorporating social media into educational settings as well as significant issues to be taken into consideration at each phase of planning, designing, teaching, and evaluation.

UNIT II

Developing Powerful Instructional Strategies with Social Media

4

DESIGNING RECORDED VOICE REFLECTION AS A PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGY

Dana A. Tindall

Social Media and Reflective Practice

Web 2.0 social media has the opportunity to change education, but in spite of a great range of teaching and learning possibilities, institutional adoption has lagged. Many students have grown up with Web 2.0 social media applications and are familiar with podcasts and social networking, but many institutions still wonder how to adopt these tools (Barnes & Tynan, 2007). Web 2.0, a term first used in 2004, describes a new way to utilize the World Wide Web as a platform where content and applications are not created and published by individuals alone, but are instead continuously modified by all users in collaboration (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). The Web honors multiple forms of intelligence (Brown, 2000). Pictures, audio, video, and hyperlinks to other online resources make Web 2.0 into a network of multiple information dissemination that goes beyond just text. Knowledge is stored, retrieved, created, or amended digitally online in a variety of media forms easily found by a user. Dohn (2009) refers to Web 2.0 as “certain forms of activities or practices … not a binary function, but rather a question of degree” (p. 345). It is then essentially a framework and flexible modality for interaction and shared thinking, and can be considered to be a technology for holding and distributing interaction. Aside from only student-to-student interaction, social media offers the opportunity for student-to-instructor interaction. Students may provide a variety of media for instructor review and feedback. Beyond just online fulfillment of assignments, students may also use social media as a communication tool to provide proof of personal reaction, opinion, and reflection. Social media tools form a conduit for reflective activity in a very rich form.

Although the definition and concept of the term reflection is hazy (Atkins & Murphy, 1993), reflection describes a way of making sense or adapting internally to the world around us, and as such is a form of learning. An overarching theme is that internal conceptual change occurs as a result of reflection. Boud (2001) states, reflection is “a process of turning experience into learning, that is a way of exploring experience in order to learn new things … it involves exploring messy and confused events and focusing on the thoughts and emotions that accompany them” (p. 10). John Dewey defines reflective thinking as “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends [that] includes a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a firm basis of evidence and rationality” (Dewey, 1997, p. 6). If this is the case then learning is the dynamic act of sense-making, and is ongoing as we move through the contextual experiences of our lives. Learning is defined as the process of revised interpretation of experience, which guides understanding appreciation and action (Mezirow, 1990).

Reflection is a learning experience but is also part of the internal life narrative. It is the element of a story, a narrative where meaning concerning the ways in which we react to stimuli and the way we lead our lives is constructed. Those internal narratives, reflective elements included, are where experiences are tied together and sense is made. We create a story of our life, and as Daniel Pink (2005) states: “stories are how we remember” (p. 99). Storytelling is the act of stringing together, relating incidents, and making arguments (Conrad, 2008). Reflection then can be a process of reconciliation and making sense through an internal storytelling process that may also contain elements of emotion.

Reflection not only provides a deeper version of our own life story but it also informs our philosophy of life through learning. This learning in turn informs future reaction to contextual stimuli and continually shapes our perceptions. It can be considered a guidance tool that forms a path for life activities, and consequently helps through social contact to shape the life, reflections, and story paths of those who may surround and interact with us. Alexandra (2008), an ethnographic researcher, examined a case in which Irish immigrants manipulated multimedia to digitally document their personal stories. Her study discusses considered and adapted reflections of past experiences successfully represented in multimedia, which provided complex testimonials to garner empathy from an external audience. The immigrant’s complex process for creating their reflections was involved; their reflection included thoughtful choices for media representation, and the process was critical in nature and transformative for the creators. It then provided a rich narrative of the immigrant’s experience for the external audience. Observers of these reflective stories become intellectually and emotionally charged and in turn become reflective. The element of emotion then must be considered as part of the reflective experience.

As humans we are somewhat, for better or worse, guided by emotion that also plays an important part of our reflective process. We cannot ignore the role of emotion as a factor in our thoughts and cognitive processing (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007). It is part of our daily lives and is deeply ingrained in the process of the daily living experience. Feelings, acknowledged or not, because they are part of our cognitive processing are a factor in the reflective process. When we recount our experiences to others, either informally or in a formal context such as in educational interaction, an element of emotion will likely be present. We understand this emotion through the spoken word by way of inflection, choice of wording, and structure of our story-conveying utterances.

Oral stories and the associated background reflective activity can and has traditionally, via transcription been converted into a symbolic tool such as text which holds that knowledge accessible via the act of reading over a period of time. We are organisms with several senses; memory and narrative contain elemental artifacts of our sensory perceptions, which are bound to our understanding of the world. Multiple sensory inputs are a part of our daily experience, and remembrance of those elements is included into our life story and subsequently our reflective activity. Reflection can involve a complex version of interpretive remembering, with defined experiences in collective formats that include sight and sound and elements of emotion all rolled into a rich internal narrative. Oral stories and reflection can, via a transcription, be converted into a tool such as text that holds knowledge accessible over a period of time. Reflection can go beyond commonly used text representation. The power of the spoken word may be converted in other ways through now available technologies that permit reflective narrative to be provided in a multimedia sense somewhat similar to the case cited above. The recording of the spoken word digitally holds the same knowledge and validity as it would be transcribed into text. It can be a record of knowledge accessible over time, but can also include added emotional elements exemplified through the primal power of articulated sound. Through recorded sound an observer may detect an implicit deeper meaning in reflection by way of inflection, choice of wording and sentence structure, which provides rich additional insight into the thought process, problem solving, and the reflective transformational learning process.

Recorded audio reflection can thus be considered an educational tool to be used as a strategy for learning. The interactive and now practically ubiquitous tools provided by social media found on the internet provide a natural format for educators to access the reflective process of the student in a much richer form than just text. The perception of emotion presented vocally can become part of the assessment strategy. An educator by way of listening to a reflective assignment may judge content as well as voice inflection to detect the impact of a lesson or contextual immersion upon their students.

Web 2.0 and Audio Recording Modalities

We can communicate rich content through our voices; it seems fitting that technology tools for recording and holding this audio should be taken advantage of for teaching and learning strategies. The voice, as stated, can carry emotion and the addition of any emotive content expressed with voice inflection gives an instructor an advantage in assessing the content and depth of the student’s reflective reactions to a contextual experience or any learning materials presented to them. This vocal ability goes well beyond text, where emotion can only be expressed by a learned competency of written language skills. The grammatical dexterity and vocabulary skills of some students may not match the emotion they attempt to communicate in reflection. Reflection is above all a thoughtful personal reaction to a stimulus, and through voice nuance an instructor might be able to discern aspects of a student’s thought processes and associated emotional communication that can be easily lost because of lacking written rhetorical skills.

Instructor choices and consideration of pedagogical strategy design must be taken into account, as there are several types of technologies and unique protocols for usage of audio recording as a reflective modality. Three pertinent features to the use of digital audio recording in education are podcasts, blogs, and voice discussion boards.

Podcasts

Podcasts are essentially recorded audio material used for a variety of means. Podcasting is of recent interest to educators because it gives them the ability to record lectures and instructions for students to download and use on their portable computer devices or mobile phones (Abedin, 2011). Podcasts are commonly and largely objectivist in nature; knowledge exists outside of the student and is transferred from the external into the mind of the student rather than being constructed from within. Podcasts, like lectures, seek to transfer knowledge to learners in an efficient, effective manner (Hannafin, 1997). This is not to say podcasts must be narrative nature. They can contain edited audio from a wide variety of sources all produced to create an interesting knowledge artifact from which a learner may construct their own meaning. Podcasts may additionally be used as a container for active reflective thought created by the student while immersed in a contextual environment. They can be used as a container for a summative transformative reflection as well. Any podcast can be recorded and contained on a computer or on a mobile recording device, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), digital audio recorder, or even a cell or smart phone. There is a plethora of free and for purchase audio editing programs available for download via the Internet. Many computer operating systems come with at least a rudimentary audio recording and editing program where collected audio reflections may be turned into a suitable audio document for sharing online either with the public, or for educational purposes with the instructor or class peers. Podcasts of reflections are essentially recorded audio journals, rich with personal data such as descriptions, analysis, and reflection complete with voice inflection that suggests emotional reaction. Once created a recorded reflective podcast must have then a container in which it may be archived and appropriately shared.

Blogs

One Web 2.0 modality that may function as the container for audio reflection is a blog. A blog can be described as an online forum for collection of personal writing, interactive discussion, and for educational journalistic activities such as reflection. Because they are digital, blogs can contain or link to almost any kind of digital artifact including audio recordings of reflection. In a sense then a blog is a repository of digital materials and is presented to the observer in ordered fashion. Where a podcast functions as a single stand-alone entity, a blog instead is instead a collection of digital entities that may include a recording such as a podcast. Blogs come in many forms, all available online, and can be held by a single individual or a group either publically or privately. Though blogs usually are free of cost, and easily obtained, there are some drawbacks and concerns for instructors to consider when using blogs found on the internet. Highest among these is the privacy of the student.

One very useful feature, and a factor both pro and con in using blogs for education, is the ability to collect comments which may form useful feedback, and spur critical discussions among the audience of classmates or even the public at large if so desired. The instructor however must weigh the positive with the potential for the negative; this same capability may attract derisive statements by the audience, which in turn may inhibit creation of further reflective content by the student creator. Just the anticipation of having private thoughts and reflections exposed with student perceived lack of control to an audience of any type might inhibit the reflective process and a sharing of thoughts or emotions. That said, privacy, specifically visibility to an audience or the ability of that audience to post comments is a prime concern for the instructor in the course design process.

Voice Discussion Boards

Somewhat similar in form to a blog is a voice discussion board. Currently Wimba Voice Tools^® provides this service which can be institutionally purchased and contained in a course management system (CMS). Like their text counterpart, they can be used as part of the pedagogical structure set up by an instructor in a CMS. Because it is contained within the CMS, it is shielded from the public so there is a measure of privacy assured. Wimba looks and functions very much like a common text-based discussion board, but has an audio recording function for posting which, if desired, may be accompanied by text in a single post. Technological issues can cause problems on occasion (Yaneske & Oates, 2010). Many times an instructor is ill prepared to deal with such issues. Wimba makes recording and posting audio reflection and comments a simple task for both the student and instructor. It assists the instructor in terms of technology; the recording and playback feature is contained within the voice discussion board interface, and only requires an external speaker and a microphone, a set of headphones w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Unit I: Planning a Socially Enriched Learning Environment
• 1 Analysis In Virtual Worlds The Influence of Learner Characteristics on Instructional Design
• 2 Blurring The Lines Teacher Insights on the Pitfalls and Possibilities of Incorporating Online Social Media into Instructional Design
• 3 Analysis Of Second Life As A Delivery Mechanism In Efl Education
• UNIT II Developing Powerful Instructional Strategies with Social Media
• 4 Designing Recorded Voice Reflection As A Pedagogical Strategy
• 5 Live In Your World, Learn In Ours Virtual Worlds … Engaging the New Generation of Students
• 6 Developing A Wiki For Problem-Based Online Instruction And Web 2.0 Exploration
• 7 Learning And Teaching As Communicative Actions Social Media as Educational Tool
• UNIT III Teaching Successfully with Social Media
• 8 Everyone's All A-Twitter About Twitter Three Operational Perspectives on Using Twitter in the Classroom
• 9 Online Videos In The Classroom Exploring the Opportunities and Barriers to the Use of YouTube in Teaching Introductory Sociology
• 10 A Framework To Enrich Student Interaction Via Cross-Institutional Microblogging
• UNIT IV Assessing Instructional Effectiveness with Social Media
• 11 Designing Assessments For Differentiated Instruction Using Social Media Applications
• 12 Voicethread® As A Facilitator Of Instructional Critique
• 13 Is There (Still) A Place For Blogging In The Classroom? Using Blogging to Assess Writing, Facilitate Engagement, and Evaluate Student Attitudes
• Index