According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith & Zickuhr, 2010) teen and young adult use of social networking sites has exploded since 2006. Yet, most collegiate faculty will choose not to embrace a device that could greatly enhance their teaching prowess and, more importantly, assist the development of their students.

Digital Immigrant professors often believe that Digital Native students’ familiarity with social media software and cutting edge mobile technologies corresponds to a deep and critical use of Twitter, Facebook and blogs in research or coursework applications (Kumar, 2010). This double-edged facet both excites and scares faculty. If students are so familiar with social media, then they could use it to uncover new ways to research material. If students are so much more versed than faculty in the technology, then I, as a teacher, cannot teach them.

There is a solution to this problem. The use of an effective and basic social media tool in the higher education classroom can be a wonderful bridge between the cyber skills of students and the thoughtful lessons provided by professors. The answer is found in creating a blogging assignment.

In my Writing for the Media course, I adopted the creation of a blog as a new assignment. As a Digital Immigrant professor whose early professional and academic careers pre-dated the Internet, I was, at first, skeptical of introducing a technology-based exercise in which I held very little expertise. Deep down I knew that I needed to shelve my fear and learn as much about blogs as I could because it made sense to use web tools as a relational component of instruction. Besides, blogs are particularly well suited for a whole variety of courses. They can be used for writing essays, research, communication studies, visual art galleries, e-Portfolios and other impactful endeavors. And blogs make fantastic end-of-semester presentation forums.

Based upon my experience, I recommend a few essential steps for implementing a blog as a student-generated learning exercise. First, discover as much as you can about the appearance and basic functionality of blogs. You do not need to be an IT expert; however, you do need to have a good idea about how to create and update posts, and the overall maintenance. Second, find a free platform, such as Blogger or WordPress, to house the student blogs. This search will greatly assist the access and naming conditions for project work with very little hassle. Third, create your own site before you ask students to create theirs. Here is where you can get ahead of the curve, maintain an expert practitioner status and promote your confidence. This is my site here: http://massmediazone.blogspot.com/

These simple steps will assist your in learning the new language of blogs and the unique cultural qualities of social media. In time, you will be like every immigrant and learn to love your new land.

References:
Kumar, S. (2010). Teaching history with blogs for student engagement and critical use of digital media. Journal of Applied Computing, Vol. 6, No. 2: 69-76.

Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., and Zickuhr, K. (2010). Social media & mobile internet use among teens and young adults. Pew Internet & American Life Project. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, Vol. 9, No. 5: 1-6.

Dr. David McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Digital Media at Ashland University.

Web 2.0 Tools for Lifelong Learning in Online Courses

Learn how you can harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies to support your instructional goals while connecting more effectively with your students in the online classroom.

Constant change is emerging as the new normal. In order to survive and thrive, organizations and individuals must be able to adjust, and enhance their knowledge and skills to meet evolving needs. This means the most important thing your students can learn is how to learn.

Although today’s students are among the most tech savvy ever, no matter how much time they spend on Facebook, they still might not be getting all the educational benefit they could from their time online.

Many students also have a lot to learn about the difference between public and private use of Web 2.0 technologies.

In Web 2.0 Tools for Lifelong Learning in Online Courses, Dr. Joanna “Joni” Dunlap shows how to use technology to engage your students and prepare them for lifelong learning.

View a short clip from the seminar:

Order the CD + transcript

Insights You Can Use & Share
Here are just some of the approaches and applications you’ll know how to employ after participating in this seminar:

• How to let pedagogy, rather than technology, guide your selection of Web 2.0 techniques
• How to make course work relevant to students by drawing upon your own experience
• How to show students the career-building applications of Web 2.0
• How to set expectations for participation
• How to model effective technology use
• How to make effective Web 2.0 use part of assessment.

You’ll also receive a reference sheet with links to sites discussed in the seminar and a copy of a book chapter on using Web 2.0 tools and technologies to support the development of students’ lifelong learning skills, which Dunlap co-authored.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

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Assuming that your students will pick up a new technology on their own is a recipe for disaster. You must also be explicit about how you want them to use these systems to avoid them going off in the wrong direction.

Training your students in the use of technology need not be time consuming. The secret is to only do it once—it becomes time consuming when you need to repeat the training over and over.

You can take time in class to demonstrate how to use a system, but what about the students who miss class that day, or simply forget parts of the presentation? You can write out the steps for an online class, but seeing how something is done is far more effective in learning a process than reading about it.

Happily, it is very easy to make a screencast that walks people through the process and allows them to view it as often as they need. I’ve found that it takes far less time to make a screencast of a process than to write out the directions. I’ve also found that I get far fewer questions about a process with a screencast than written directions.

I make screencasts to explain nearly any task to students or colleagues. For instance, if I make a spreadsheet for my boss or others, I’ll accompany it by a two or three minute screencast pointing out which cells contain which information. This saves a lot of time explaining things later. I also make screencasts showing students how to post to the class blog and wiki, and allow them to view them on their own.

Screencasting only requires a microphone, which are built into some laptops, and if not can be purchased for around $30. The system will record your mouse movements and everything you do on the screen while you describe the process. There are numerous free and easy to use systems, and sites to post the results for your audience to watch or download at their leisure.

Once you start screencasting, you won’t want to stop. Have fun!

Feedback
As usual, I welcome your comments, criticisms, and cries of outrage in the comments section of this blog.

Links to Free Screencasting Software for Teachers
Jing (http://www.jingproject.com): An excellent system from TechSmith which allows users to make five-minute screencaptures and either download the videos or post them to screencast.com.

ScreenJelly (http://www.screenjelly.com/): Allows for 3 minute videos that can be shared by email or Twitter.

ScreenR (http://screenr.com/): Make screencasts without downloading any software.

Screencast-O-Matic (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/): Allows for up to 15 minute screencasts that are hosted on the site or uploaded to YouTube.

John Orlando, PhD, is the program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

The good news is the number of free Web 2.0 tools to choose from seems to grow each day. The bad news is there are so many new tools that it’s hard to know which ones can be used effectively in the higher education environment and which ones aren’t worth the time.

In the 90-minute online seminar Free Web 2.0 Tools to Use Inside Your LMS, Barry Dahl gave an overview of some of his favorite Web 2.0 tools and demonstrated how easily these tools can be brought into a course management system.

Dahl, vice president of Technology and the Lake Superior Connect e-Campus at Lake Superior College, says that pulling these tools into the Learning Management System (LMS) carries many more benefits than simply linking to them. For one thing by embedding a particular Web 2.0 tool into the proper place of the course content stream students can better understand where it fits within the context of the course and why they’re using it. Secondly, by keeping students in the course shell, they’re less likely to get distracted or tempted by other things on the web.

Some of the tools Dahl demonstrated during the seminar include the Zoho Writer, a word processing application similar to Google Docs that allows multiple students to create, edit, and share documents, and Zoho Notebook, a collaborative tool that allows users to create and share multimedia notebooks with text, images, hyperlinks, and audio and video clips simply by dropping and dragging the different elements. He also showed how to embed Delicious bookmarks and Mindomo mind maps, and how to create short comic strips using ToonDoo – a fun application he likes to use to help students get to know one another.

All of the tools Dahl demonstrated are available for free, although some do have premium fee-based features for power users. They also have something else in common, other than their quirky names.

“Web 2.0 tools are easy to use,” says Dahl. “You don’t have to be a geek to figure them out.”

For a list of tools Dahl uses as part of his personal learning environment, visit http://barrydahl.com/ple/

Free Web 2.0 Tools to Use Inside Your LMS

It seems every day someone is touting the latest Web 2.0 tool as “the next big thing” in collaboration and social networking. Making sense of these tools … and finding those that truly can be used effectively in the higher education environment is a constant challenge. This seminar will show you which technologies are worth your time and which ones you’re better off ignoring.

Your Learning Management System (LMS) has more potential than you may realize.

Thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0 applications such as Wikis, Etherpad, and Google Wave, innovative educators are creating limitless new learning opportunities and discovering ways to embed them within existing Virtual Learning Environments.

The best news is: these interactive web-based tools are available to colleges and universities absolutely FREE and they’re relatively easy to learn.

Web 2.0 collaborative learning is all about interaction and sharing. Teaching at the 2.0 level can transform and reinvigorate your classes while unleashing student and faculty potential.

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In Free Web 2.0 Tools to Use Inside Your LMS, presenter Barry Dahl, Vice President of Technology and Lake Superior Connect e-Campus at Lake Superior College, discusses the best online tools to enhance and upgrade course delivery. An experienced online educator, Dahl demonstrates where to find the most powerful complimentary online applications and explain how to put them to work in your classes.

This is one of Dahl’s most popular workshops, due to the growing interest in adapting online platforms to higher education.

This audio online seminar covers:

• Which online systems to investigate and which to skip
• Level 2.0 ways to collaborate and share inside your LMS
• How to add web content in just two clicks
• Tools for creating and submitting multimedia homework assignments
• Integrating web tools with your Learning Management System
• Using student authoring tools for simultaneous writing
• Creating collaborative group research projects for online sharing
• “Poking holes” in your LMS to allow communication with the outside world
• Outcome examples for faculty tasks and student assignments

This demonstration is conducted using Desire2Learn, but the same principles apply to any other LMS, including Blackboard, Angel, Moodle, etc.

Order this seminar

In one such study, Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthal from the University of Colorado at Denver used Twitter as a way to enhance social presence in an online course. In an article that appears in the Journal of Information Systems Education (see reference below) the authors discuss the ease in which Twitter can enable “free-flowing just-in-time interactions” and describe the instructional benefits they discovered in using the micro-blogging service.

Based on their experience using Twitter with their students, the authors also offer five guidelines for using Twitter in the classroom:

1. Make it relevant: Following celebrities on Twitter can be fun, but make sure students understand how Twitter will help them meet certain learning goals for your course. Show them examples of how you have benefitted from using Twitter.
2. Define clear expectations: The authors required students to use Twitter two-three times a day for two weeks. After that time, if the student decides he or she doesn’t see a value in Twitter, then they are not required to keep using it. However, the authors found that most continued participating in the Twitter discussions for the duration of the course and beyond.
3. Model effective and appropriate Twitter use: Demonstrate for your students Twitter best practices by showing them how you use the application to connect with colleagues, share information, and ask and answer questions. It’s also a good idea to remind them that Twitter, like other social networking sites, is a public forum.
4. Build Twitter activity into assessment: To reinforce Twitter as a valuable resource, the authors encouraged students to use information and resources gathered through Twitter participation in their research papers and presentations, and assessed them on the accuracy and relevance of this information.
5. Stay active in Twitter: Continue to participate in the Twitter community you created even after the course ends. The authors found this enabled them to achieve a social presence needed to support ongoing student engagement.

Using Twitter to Keep Students Connected
An experiment on the use of social media at the University of Leicester in the UK has shown that Twitter can act as a valuable communication tool in the college setting.

The study, published by the Association for Learning Technology, discovered that ‘tweeting’ helped:

• Develop peer support among students
• Develop personal learning networks
• Students to arrange social meetings

The researchers also found Twitter to be very attractive as a data collection tool for assessing and recording the student experience, with a wide range of free and increasingly sophisticated online analysis tools.

References:
Dunlap, J.C. & Lowenthal, P.R. (2009). Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence. Journal of Information Systems Education. Retrieved November 19, 2009, from here.

University of Leicester (2009, November 16). Twittering the Student Experience. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 19, 2009, from here.

Electronic portfolios, wikis, do-it-yourself podcasts, and online collaboration tools are just some of the Web 2.0 applications being embraced by faculty as a way to give their students more control over the content and process by which they learn, says Rhonda Ficek, director of instructional technology services at Minnesota State University – Moorhead. In the October 29th online seminar, Creating a Personalized Learning Environment with Web 2.0 Tools, Ficek provided a comprehensive overview on how Web 2.0 tools are transforming teaching and learning through what has become known as Personalized Learning Environments (PLE’s).

While Learning Management Systems like WebCT and Blackboard are course-centered and largely faculty-driven, Ficek says PLE’s are learner-centered systems with four key features:

• Communication and collaboration
• Formal and informal learning
• Flexible roles and structures
• Electronic portfolios and organizers

The Web 2.0 tools used to create PLE’s are easy to use, and provide anywhere from basic to advanced features for free – two factors that make them attractive to both faculty and students. Ficek demonstrated the ease-of-use for a number of applications during her seminar, including the wiki WetPaint, e-notebooks like Google Notebook and Zoho, and an electronic organizer called Zotero, which is a Firefox extension used to collect, manage and cite research sources.

“Web 2.0 applications are playing a key role in the evolution of these powerful virtual learning environments and are forcing educators to have a different attitude about the role of technology as it relates to the development, delivery, relevance and retention of content,” says Ficek, noting that tools like electronic notebooks also are more efficient for instructors than traditional notebooks and provide her with a quick and easy way to provide feedback.

“These applications are also empowering learning in ways that hadn’t been possible before,” she says.