Month: July 2011

It’s taking me a while, but my perspective on social media is slowly shifting.  Admittedly, I was a late-comer to the scene, and I joined Twitter and Facebook not from the perspective of a musicology instructor, but from the perspective of a dog breeder and trainer.  When one of my white German Shepherds was expecting her first litter, I started a blog and joined Twitter and Facebook.  Much of what I learned about caring for, breeding, and training dogs I learned from a cyber-community of like-minded individuals.  I wanted to give back to the community that had given me so much.  I got involved with social media.

Now that I’ve experienced the positive pedagogical effects of social media, I want to incorporate it into my classes, and there is a lot of software “out there” that will facilitate constructivist, collaborative learning.

This blog post focuses on one of the myriad softwares available:  blogging.  I have never used it in my classes, but the literature points to the positive effects of blogging on critical thinking skills, writing and literacy, and collaborative knowledge-building.  Using a social media site that I discovered for the first time in my ETEC 565 class, storify.com,  I “storify-ed” educational blogging.  Storify.com allows writers to create commentary, or stories of stories that they found on other social media pages, such as youtube, twitter, facebook, and web pages.   I must confess that I haven’t quite mastered the art of storify-ing yet, but I’m gonna keep at it until I improve.  My computer froze on me while working on the story, but I managed to clean up the project on my netbook (which lacks flash and the other goodies that allows one to view videos) a bit and write this blog.  So it’s not perfect, but I do want to share.  Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow me to embed the story into this post without divulging my UBC course password and username, so I’ll provide a link for those interested in exploring my storify.  Click here

Professional Journalists gravitate towards this software, and I can see where it would be useful to educators in social studies, the humanities, and even the sciences.  Like Twitter, you can follow the stories of other writer.  I’m currently following the stories of a fellow UBC graduate student in the journalism school.  Storify.com requires the writer to read through myriad bits of information, the way she would conduct research with pen and paper, come up with a thesis based upon the research, and state the thesis with the news stories as a way of embedding her assertions in fact.  It’s time consuming, like all good research is.  My storify is a “quick and dirty” exploration of the software’s possibilities.  I look forward to using it more often in my private and professional world.

The more I use wikis, the more excited I get about this whole notion of social media in education.  I think of social media as spaces like Facebook and MySpace.  But Bryan Alexander points out that social media goes beyond that to include blogging, of which I’m a big fan, and wikis.

I love wikis because they encapsulate what 21st-century learning is all about:  collaborative knowledge-building.  They allow students to collaborate on a single document, or they can be used to create an encyclopedia where the students themselves are the experts in the topic.  I’m using wikis in my own MET class to create a document:  developing strategies for getting students to use social media to learn, and exploring the challenges of social media in the classroom.  This is a collaborative effort where everyone in my class contributes.

At first I wondered why we couldn’t just create the document in google docs.  That’s a great space for collaborative work where you can work in programs such as word and powerpoint, and you never have to download drafts and everyone can see each other’s contributions.

For my MET course, however, a wiki suits the task perfectly.  Each of us has space to make our contributions.  Beside each posting there is an “edit” link where we can go in an edit.  However, the real draw for me was the separate discussion tab that took us away from the the original postings and allowed us to discuss each other’s contribution without messing up the original.  In google docs all discussions must take place on the document itself, and that can get incredibly cluttered.

If I were to find one challenge with the wiki it would be that once in the discussion space, you no longer have access to the original postings on the main page, so you have to go back and forth between the two tabs.   When I made my postings, only a few of my classmates had posted theirs, so it wasn’t too challenging for me to remember who said what.  In a large class, that could be a real problem  In discussion forums very often when you click “reply” you can see the post that you’re replying to, and that’s helpful as you’re writing your response.

I can see myself using wikis in my Survey course.  I can use it as a space for students to explore topics in music history and write a wiki article on their chosen topic.  I could also ask them to analyze a complicated piece of music, such as a movement of a symphony or a bit of chamber music in sonata form.  That would be a tough assignment to give to my undergraduate students to work on individually, but it would be a wonderful opportunity for the class as a whole to analyze the work then synthesize the movement, to make meaning of something so complex.  That is what knowledge construction is all about.

References

Alexander, B. (2006).  Web 2.0:  A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?  Educause Review, 33-43.

Boris teaches chemistry at a high school in Canada.  He’s been using the school’s Moodle server to disseminate class notes, lab sheets etc to his students.  He’s found that there’s a disconnect between students’ performance in lab and their examinations, especially where the periodic table is concerned.  For those of you who are NOT science people, like me, this is what the periodic table looks like.

To the uninitiated, it’s incredibly dull, yet extremely critical to many disciplines.  Boris found the few students who were successful in that part of the exam had memorized the table.  Good for them.  The question remains, for how long after the exam did they remember the table?  Were they able to use it a month later to solve a problem?  Gibbs and Simpson (2005) point out that studying for exams, particularly memorizing, represents surface learning.  Students pay close attention to what they think they’ll be tested on, but fail to interact with the course content in ways that will promote deep learning (p. 5).

There is no question that perhaps in every discipline, there are some things that need to be memorized.  This can be facilitated by looking at the logical arrangement of the material, or using mnemonic devices.  There’s another way that’s perhaps most useful because it allows students to interact with the material on a deeper level and in multiple ways, and enables them to use the material:  assessments.  And these come in various forms beside multiple choice questions (Jenkins, 2005, p. 69).

Boris recognizes that he needs to give students more time to review the periodic table, beyond the worksheets that he hands out to them.  Students need to have timely feedback on their work if it is to benefit them.   Boris could have the students do their worksheets online, and then have their peers assess and provide feedback.  He could also upload case studies or problem sets for students to work on collaboratively (Jenkins, p. 72).

He could also create online quizzes that would test students’ understanding of the table.  These self-assessments are relatively easy to create in Moodle, even by novices.  Moodle can even be programmed to grade the quiz (except for essay questions), and provide immediate feedback to students.   If students get the answer to a question wrong, Moodle will provide feedback to the student that will help him assess his thinking about the question, and push him towards the correct answer.  These are particularly helpful if students can retake the quizzes multiple times.

These formative assessments are particularly useful because they are short, and focus on small segments of course materials.  These types of assessments are most beneficial to learning because students can no longer develop strategies for merely passing the course, but are guided in learning all the topics.  Students’  study time for the course is evenly distributed throughout the course  (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005, p. 14), and this supports Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) “time on task.”

By setting up the review online, students can work at their own pace, receive timely feedback on their work while building a sense of community, and will free up class time for Boris to focus on other aspects of the discipline. It will also free up his time:  he will not have to spend hours grading worksheets.

References:

Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987).  Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate    education.  American Association for Higher Education Bulletin. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm.

Gibbs,G. & Simpson, C. (2005).  Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.  Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1),  3-31.  Retrieved from
http:// www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/simpson.pdf

Jenkins, M.  (2005).  Unfulfilled promise:  Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.  Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 67-80.  Retrieved from http://www2.glos.ac.uk/offload/tli/lets/lathe/issue1/articles/jenkins.pdf