Microblogging in the classroom

by | Wednesday, November 12, 2008

I have written quite a bit about how a technology can become an educational technology (see this, this, this and this). This is a non-trivial task that all educators face, and requires situational creativity in re-purposing / re-designing the existing tool to meet classroom / pedagogical needs. In this posting I would like to describe one current experiment with micro-blogging that we conducted in my CEP917 doctoral seminar. As the wikipedia article says, Micro-blogging

is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them… The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due in that it is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size (e.g. text, audio or video) but is the same in that people utilize it for both business and individual reasons.

As expected, the experiment was interesting…

To give some context to this experiment, I would like to point to the controversy surrounding the use of laptops in classrooms. There have been news stories about professors banning their use in classrooms. For some recent stories see this and this. There are others who have been somewhat more creative with the ban than others (see this story for instance). I have written about it as well, here and here.

In general my stance has been that having laptops in the classroom is neither a good or bad thing. It really depends on how the classroom is structured and what students are supposed to do with it. In a previous posting I had written the following

What I have found though is that having students with their laptops with wireless internet access, enriches my classes in ways I could not have imagined. More often than not, I find students conducting Google searches, tracking down articles, nailing down obscure facts, in ways that directly connect to what is being discussed in class. My students often share what they have found with me and the other class-participants.

I see no reason to be threatened by this, in fact I believe that this enhances student engagement with the ideas, and that is always a good thing.

The fact of the matter is that students can goof off even when there is no technology (as I did and continue to do so at meetings) when the topics being discussed appear irrelevant and/or boring. This just raises the bar for us as instructors, pushing us to try harder to make our classes interesting, challenging and engaging.

So the question becomes how can we use the fact that students bring laptops to their classes to increase their engagement with ideas. One possible solution was offered to me by one of my students (Noah Ullmann) in my 917 doctoral seminar. As a class assignment Noah was looking at possible educational uses of micro-blogging. He thought that micro-blogging could be used by students to take notes during class, and he was thinking of using Twitter as a possible solution. After more thought, though, it appeared that it may be more fruitful to have some kind of “shared” micro-blogging platform that would allow ALL the students to participate in taking notes, making comments etc. A bit of research led to a couple of other tools: Edmodo and todaysmeet. We finally decided to go with TodaysMeet – given how easy it was to set up and use. So yesterday, the whole class signed up on TodaysMeet and blogged during the entire class discussion and activity. You can see a transcript of the entire discussion here.

So how did it go? A couple of quick thoughts. First, I had less control over the discourse of the class. For instance, it appeared that there were two discussions going on, one face to face and the other online. Since I did not have my laptop open, I was somehow cut of the latter. Second, despite this seeming lack of control, I did feel that the class as a whole was engaged with the issues and topics at hand.

At the end of the class, upon being quizzed, the students seemed to feel that this experiment had been a success and would like to do it again. However, as an instructor I was not as sure. I felt that the pedagogical move of going from a technology to an educational technology had not really be completed, the circle had not been squared. what I mean by this is that, as the instructor, I have not yet figured out a way to bring the micro-blogging activity back to the class. It seemed to exist in this little bubble by itself, apart from what was going on in the classroom.

I have some ideas about how this can be fixed … but that, I guess will be another posting.

Topics related to this post: Blogging | Creativity | Design | Learning | Stories | Teaching | Technology | TPACK | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Evaluating creative learning environments: New instrument

Evaluating creative learning environments: New instrument

Note: This post (and the SCALE instrument) has been updated on 2.21.18  Creativity is a key educational goal and essential 21st century skill. That said, much of the existing research in the field of creativity has focused on individual, psychological, and/or...

Best of SkyMall

I love browsing through the SkyMall catalog when I am flying. I never cease to be amazed by human ingenuity - the range of things we have built, irrespective of how useful (or useless they may be). Anyway, someone has now listed the 10 best (or worst, depending on...

TE150 & the hope of audacity

Matt Koehler and I were asked to create an audio introduction to TE150 for the ATT and MSU award ceremony, and website. It is amazing what three people can do in a couple of hours, given a microphone and Audacity (the open source audio editing software). Check it out...

Seeing differently (veja du with video)

I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently - of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students. I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples...

Money for nothing, and your clicks for free!

I knew that website developers would go to great lengths to rise in Google rankings. What I didn't know was just how far people were willing to go, till I received this email. Note: I have deleted all the links and names, since that would be giving free publicity to...

The many (type)faces of politicis

Leigh Graves Wolf forwarded to me a link to an NPR story about fonts and the presidential campaign. As the USA network slogan goes, "Characters welcome." You can follow the story here: Character matters. Following a few more links led me to some more sites: (1)...

Symmetry: new ambigram

I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...

Off to India

I am heading off to India tomorrow and will be gone for approximately two weeks. The main reason for this trip is to attend the International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil in New Delhi. I am scheduled to present and act as a resource person for...

1 Comment

  1. Gaurav

    twitter and others are no doubt nice, but I always wanted to bring in a concept to microblogging !

    I hereby post a Review-Request for http://www.emote.in ,

    A microblogging service; which is a platform to –
    1. Make yourself heard, comment on news, stories and current affair.
    2. Share your experiences, memories and events with your friends and family.
    3. Connect with different people with similar emotional attributes as yours.
    (eg: if attrocities on animals make you sad, connect with others who share the same feeling)
    4. Jot-down your experiences. You usually have so many things to say – a constant stream of thoughts, comments and observations running through your head continuously.
    5. Last but not the least, has everything (and much more) that twiiter has.

    6. A wonderful timeline coming shortly (in few weeks)

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. When tech comes first: The Khan Academy as leading pedagogical change | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] have made similar arguments about the use of micro-blogging in the classroom (see posts here and [...]
  2. EdTech 2009 Keynote Address: TPACK | DMS's ITRT - [...] creativity to make technology tools “educational”.  Read about his experiment with microblogging in his university classroom.   Mishra and Koehler’s…

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *