Robert Foster and Diane Rasmussen Neal

Introduction

‘The importance of engaging students in new and emerging technologies in education cannot be overestimated.’

(Tadros, 2011, p. 84)

What are the students of today really looking for when they enrol in a course at a college or university? Or perhaps a more appropriate question might be: How do teachers actually get their students tuned in and fully engaged to the topic at hand? As a student, it is my belief that through the adoption and use of modern technology, particularly social media tools, the instructors in the post-secondary academic setting can provide a much more comprehensive and, frankly, interesting programme for today’s ‘tech-savvy’ students.

We are now living in a social media world. And the numbers are compelling. As at the end of September 2011, Facebook claimed it had over 800 million user accounts. Twitter, another mainstream social media tool, reported in the same month that they had over 100 million active users. After the failure of Google Buzz, Google has made another entry into the social networking field with Google +. YouTube and other media sharing sites such as Flickr remain popular. And other recent social media trends, such as location-based technologies like Foursquare or location-based capabilities in Twitter and Facebook, continue to grow in popularity.

Social media sites are no longer just person-to-person relationships. Both the business and political worlds have adopted and use social media tools for outreach to the world. Corporations such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Best Buy and many others deliver information to customers through social media channels, providing marketing, promotional and general information for their followers. In the political field, parties and individual politicians now make heavy use of social media to get their messages out. The now-classic example of the power of social media is Barack Obama’s quest for the US presidency in 2008. As was noted by David Carr (2008) in The New York Times just ahead of the new President’s swearing-in, using social media ‘was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory’ (para. 12). Even in the Canadian setting politicians are now using these technologies, with Treasury Board president Tony Clement apparently being the model to follow. Mia Pearson (2011), writing on the use of social media in the political sphere for The Globe and Mail, noted that ‘[w]ith frequent tweets and an honest, personable style, Mr. Clement has earned praise for his approach to Twitter and has built a large following’ (para. 24).

The reality is that today’s college and university-age generation, having grown up with these technologies, make heavy use of social media tools. While I do not have statistical proof, I can say anecdotally both watching and dealing with my own children and discussing with others of the same age that the social media tools of today are the communication methods of choice. And their use continues to expand with new and more powerful devices, a slew of new operating systems, expanded and cost-effective wireless capabilities, and the development of both fun and practical applications fuelling the use of social media. Thus, when it comes to academia, these are technologies that should be explored and adopted to meet the needs of today’s students.

One of the most interesting and, in my opinion, relevant courses to my future role in the library world was taught by the editor of this book, Dr Diane Rasmussen Neal, at The University of Western Ontario (UWO) in the winter of 2011. Entitled ‘Social software and libraries’, this was an online course that explored a wide array of social media applications, including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and online social networks. Since it was an elective course for the Master of Library and Information Science degree, the course also focused on the role of social media software in the context of library service provision.

Designing and delivering a class in social media

Our ‘Social software and libraries’ course had been a favourite among our students even before I started teaching it in winter 2011. The previous instructor had only taught the course online. The administration asked me to teach two sections of the class in the same term and suggested that I teach one section online and one face-to-face. Since I had taught courses online since 2004 and I possess a strong interest in online education pedagogy, I requested that both sections be taught online. I felt strongly that using social media to teach students about social media made the most pedagogical sense. With this approach, the course delivery itself becomes part of the learning experience. Ultimately, we decided to combine the two sections into one large section, with 39 students enrolled in total.

At the time, the university officially supported the use of WebCT to deliver online courses. However, widespread student and instructor dissatisfaction with the system, as well as its lack of a social media ‘feel’, led me to decide against using it. Instead, I planned a number of delivery methods. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I discovered http://www.edmodo.com for course management. Edmodo is a social learning website that ‘provides teachers and students a secure place to connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications. Our goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner’ (Edmodo, 2012, para. 1). As of March 2012, the site claimed to serve over 6,500,000 students and teachers. Edmodo has a ‘look and feel’ that is similar to Facebook. The instructor creates a secure, private ‘group’ for each class, and everyone in the class can post files, links and comments. As a free, cloud-based service, the instructor has no need for financial resources or technical support. My university upholds academic freedom by stating that we can use any resource we choose for online course delivery; I admittedly felt quite liberated by making this choice. The students and I used Edmodo to communicate with each other, and every day we posted items of interest that we found in the news. Additionally, I requested that students contact me by private Edmodo message instead of email; any online instructor understands how overwhelming it can be to receive emails from students. This helped me organize my course communications and my time: when I was ready to work on the class each day, I logged into Edmodo, and everything was there.

I delivered most content through a course blog. On the same day each week, I posted a ‘lesson’ that contained my introduction to and thoughts about the week’s topic, embedded links to readings and instructions for what the students needed to do to complete the lesson. I linked to each week’s blog post in Edmodo when it was posted. The lessons consisted of the following topics.

In addition to text, I also provided screencasts and screenshots to explain how to complete more difficult tasks. For tasks that were slightly more technical, such as creating a mashup or subscribing to RSS feeds, these methods communicated much more effectively than text, and students indicated appreciation for them.

For each lesson, the students had to do hands-on tasks related to the lesson – set up a blog, edit a wiki, tag some items, etc. – and then discuss their experiences in their blog posts. Additionally, each student was required to start a class blog and blog about their experiences completing the lessons. I linked to all students’ blogs on my blog so that students could read and comment on their peers’ experiences.

I led an optional, weekly hour-long synchronous course chat in a Meebo group. Attendance at these chats was somewhat low but I posted a transcript of each week’s chat in Edmodo so that students who were not able to participate in the chat could read it at their convenience.

Students’ participation in the above social media interactions comprised their participation grade. In addition, they had to complete an individual report on a current social media topic of their choice, and an individually completed analysis of a library’s social media offerings. The final project was a group project in which they had to create a social media plan, as well as sample sites and content, for a real or fictitious organization of their choice. I had made connections with a number of non-profit health organizations through professional connections for which some students completed their projects. Instead of creating a plan, one group led successful webinars on social media for a health organization’s constituents.

The students’ motivations and expectations for the course

Sara Wiseman, Samantha Thompson and I took the course on social media together. All three of us have similar student profiles in that time has lapsed between our original degree studies and our enrolment in the Master of Library and Information Science programme at UWO. At the same time, however, we brought quite different educational backgrounds and experience into Diane’s course, providing a combination of views that supplied wide-ranging insights for the review of this type of class. Sara received an honours degree in religious studies, with a major in fine arts. Samantha had recently completed her Doctorate in Philosophy after switching from earlier courses in music and physics. As for me, I originally studied mathematics and computer science after high school but eventually completed my degree in political science.

The three of us took this course for somewhat different reasons. Samantha enrolled in the course to force her to engage more with social media. She was of course interested in how libraries use social media but she had a lack of knowledge about these types of tools, thus providing a strong motivation for her. Very few of her friends and acquaintances were actively present in social networks. However, of those that were, several were very active in Facebook. One of Samantha’s concerns was that, once she joined, her friends would only communicate with her via this media. As she noted, ‘I didn’t want to be constrained to have to check a Facebook account frequently to keep in contact with one or two people.’

Samantha admitted that she had a lot of apprehension regarding social media and it very much took her out of her comfort zone:

I was worried about being overwhelmed by these tools. I wasn’t so much worried about their being difficult to use in themselves (after all, they’re supposed to be user-friendly) as with their being difficult to manage (with number of accounts, number of passwords, number of people I would come into contact with, number of features and ways of communicating per tool). I felt that I was getting into the game at a late stage, and wouldn’t feel comfortable or at home with these media. I was therefore hoping that Diane’s course would hold my hand as I dove into this new world, and show me a way to use social media in a discerning way.

Sara came at the course very much from the library and future employment point of view. She noted that both in her library and Master’s degree experience she was seeing major changes taking place in libraries. Information must be available online, and its use was growing both in public and academic libraries. Her first taste of this came when she purchased her first electronic book reader. As she noted, she suddenly found it inconvenient to make a trip to the public library to pick up a book instead of just downloading it at home in a matter of minutes; a visit to the library for many now happens in a virtual world. Sara decided to take this course realizing that library staff must be proficient in this area, and that it would be advantageous for her in gaining post-degree employment if she understood these technologies. Sara’s expectation for the course was that she would learn more about the various social networking tools. As the course was geared to library and information science students, she expected to learn about the relevance of social media in libraries.

My perspective was a little different from my colleagues. I came into the class figuring that it would be a pretty easy credit for me. My background before joining the Master’s programme at UWO was in information technology, having begun my career in programming and having eventually worked my way into project management. Perhaps somewhat naively I also felt I knew social media well, particularly having been an early adopter and an active user of Facebook. So, my expectation in taking the course was that it would be fairly simple and would provide a good overview of a variety of technologies that I had not used before.

The instructor’s expectations

I like to think that my expectations for the course were fairly straightforward. First, as noted above, I expected that the students would use social media to learn about social media. The first week’s activities included setting up their own blog, writing an introductory post on the blog, setting up an Edmodo account, and introducing themselves on Edmodo. Tasks varied as the course progressed, such as editing a Wikipedia entry, trying a social network new to them, and so on. Obviously, if they were not able to do the weekly activities they would not be able to complete the class. For this reason, I see my course design as opposite to other courses about social media in my faculty, in which the class discusses social media from a critical or theoretical perspective. Hands-on experience is essential to learning how to use new technologies, and complementary to these other courses.

This is not to say that the course was void of critical thinking. I expected the students to think about social media policy from an organizational perspective. For example, should libraries delete inflammatory patron posts on their official social media channels, or is that the antithesis of the spirit of social media? What are the privacy concerns involved in putting organizational data on social media and in the cloud? What are the ways to write social media content that engages and involves constituents, as opposed to using it as a one-way announcement channel? Which social media outlets are best for different sizes and types of libraries? These questions are difficult to answer; the industry does not have answers for exactly how to navigate the emerging Web 2.0 world, but my students have the opportunity to help answer them in their future careers.

I did not expect students to become programmers or high-level technical experts by taking my course. One power of social media is that users do not have to be hard-core ‘techies’; there is no need for most of us to understand or implement the underlying structures. Despite this intent, it surprised me to find that some students were even reticent to work with technology on a level that matched my expectations, perhaps that of a ‘power user’.

Students’ views about the course

Communication, and the tools provided for doing this successfully, was a key component of the class’s success. Edmodo, Diane’s weekly blog post, the weekly chat, and the outline of the methods by which and times when we could contact her with questions and concerns were all important. This was a distance course so most students lived off-campus; communication with the instructor and other classmates can be a little daunting if communication modalities are not spelled out or clearly understood.

Sara liked the fact that we were expected to familiarize ourselves with the various tools and report to the class on our experiences. As she noted, Diane’s lectures provided guidance for those of us using a social media tool for the first time, as well as some discussion about the use and relevance of the tool. Sara thought that this teaching method generally worked well for social software, which definitely needs to be learned hands-on. Some of the tools examined in the class, such as RSS feeds and wikis, were completely new to Sara. In these cases in particular, Diane’s blog posts were really helpful. For instance, she explained step-by-step how to set up and use RSS feeds. Most social software programs are designed to be user-friendly, and they were not too difficult to learn. However, the more technical exercises, such as building a mashup and posting it online, were much more challenging to learn by distance. For Sara, the more technical assignments would have been easier to learn in a computer lab with a teacher on hand for assistance.

Samantha found that the Edmodo software was generally effective for congregating and sharing. As Samantha discovered, Edmodo’s interface is like a stripped-down version of Facebook, so much so that when she finally started using Facebook it wasn’t quite so daunting. As she noted, it was also interesting to observe some of the intra-student mentoring that was taking place. Some students had much more experience than others, and on this platform we were all able to share ideas with the whole class. As Samantha noted, because Edmodo is itself a social network, it’s a way of showing rather than telling what social media is all about. Facebook could have been used, but Samantha’s guess is that it would have lacked the educational features of Edmodo (such as places to post grades) while having a glut of other features that would have cluttered a group page.

Both Sara and I also quite enjoyed using Edmodo. We spent a lot of time during the term posting articles and comments, using the tool in much the same way as Facebook. We both agreed with Samantha that the tool’s similarity to Facebook made it an easy tool to pick up and use (both of us were active on Facebook prior to taking this course).

Samantha also liked the use of the blog for Diane’s course materials. She considered it effective as a teaching tool because it was naturally chronologically organized (as lectures would be) and because it allowed us to ‘keep’ all our instructional material in one organized place accessible from any computer.

However, there were other tools used in the course that were not so successful in the way of communication. For example, there was an optional weekly Meebo chat session for members of the class which, due to other commitments, I was unable to attend. Sara attended regularly but was generally disappointed both with the substance and the tool being used. She felt that the chats might have been more successful had they been structured differently. For example, in another distance class that Sara had taken she was required to participate in two out of five online chats. These chats were well attended by students and each chat was structured as a discussion of a specific issue or topic. While Meebo was not difficult to use, Sara would have liked to have tried a different platform for instant messaging. For example, in the course we learned about Tweet chats and Facebook group chats; it would have been interesting to have tried either of these platforms at least once.

Diane provided an interesting variety of social media tools for us to explore on a weekly basis. As Samantha pointed out, she found that actually having to log on to various social media platforms and try them out was not only valuable but the only way to get to know what they are capable of. Because we were looking at a different platform or technology each week, it was difficult to really get to know the ins and outs of the various tools. However, we learned enough about each tool so that we all got a sense of how they compared to each other.

For the class, there was a group project to design a tool suite to fit an organization’s needs. Samantha’s and Sara’s group agreed, after reviewing the organization they had decided upon, that, in fact, less can be more, and identified a minimalist social media plan. As Samantha noted, however, the organization their group was working with did not want this as the solution, and, as a result, the organization was quite unimpressed with the result. My group, on the other hand, did the exact opposite, outlining a fairly comprehensive and multifaceted social media plan for the organization that we reviewed. However, in this case, the organization in the end wasn’t interested in expanding to a full social media suite and they, too, were unimpressed with the results. I think our conclusion from this project was that one must really understand not only the tools but also the culture of an organization before embarking on a social media programme.

Students’ take-aways from the course

We all came away from the course with a much better appreciation for social media than we had when we started. In particular, we have all become very aware of the role that social media plays in many of the fast-breaking current events, locally, nationally and internationally.

Conclusions from the student

‘It’s not enough for a course to be accessible online, it must also be designed in a way that keys into the digital pulse of current events, trending topics and insider knowledge endemic to the web.’

(Masoni, 2010, para. 7)

We live in a social media world and it is important that these tools are adapted and adopted in the academic setting to face this reality. As I work towards my Master’s degree, I continue to watch how my professors are making use of social media tools to help teach and prepare our classes for our future roles in the library field. On a current course I am taking, our instructor decided a few weeks into the class to use a blog to help enhance our understanding of the topic, a move I thought was very progressive. Yet he is one of the few professors in our institution who has taken advantage of this type of inexpensive, yet effective tool.

Diane’s course provided our class with a good grounding in the tools available in the social media realm. But the course also showed us that social media tools themselves are an effective way of teaching in our ‘tech-savvy’ world. Generally speaking, university students today have grown up over the past decade using and understanding the multitude of technologies available. And with the advent of lower-cost, high-speed networks and smartphones, making use of social media continues to get easier and easier.

Conclusions from the instructor

I have been teaching online since 2004, and teaching social media use to librarians since 2006. It is a reality, however, that not all professors have my fortunate background in a climate where online courses are increasingly viewed by university administrators as positive, revenue-generating business decisions. This can feel uncomfortable to faculty members for many reasons: we might not feel like we’re trained to teach online; we might resent the fact that we don’t have instructional designers ready to translate our course materials into an online format; we might believe that it takes too much time to teach online; and so on. As Maureen Henninger and I discuss in Chapter 8 of this book, we can actually leverage the ease of using social media to assist us in addressing these issues.

Therefore, I can say with experience and confidence that using social media to teach is a pleasure. It does not involve dependence on university IT staff, the tools are easy to use and you can find free options for anything you need. Using social media to teach social media is, to me, a logical connection, because it requires students to use the tools they need to learn every time they ‘go to class’. Hands-on experience is essential to learning new skills. After all, medical school students don’t learn how to perform surgery solely by talking in a classroom about performing surgery – or, for that matter, by talking about it in an institutionally-sanctioned, expensive, IT department-controlled proprietary course management system.

References