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Teaching with Social Media

Have you used or considered using social media in your classes? Teaching with social media comes with unique challenges and possibilities. Meeting learners where they are is a fundamental aspect of creating a democratic learning community. For students who already engage these technologies, adding social media to our teaching can increase access to a range of learning materials and content, mitigate educational costs associated with textbooks, and facilitate a range of expression across languages and rhetorical modes. Social media provides multiple modes of expression, connection, and exploration that empower students to take ownership over their work. Some platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are familiar to our students and can facilitate access to broader audiences. These spaces also pose challenges in our pedagogical practices in terms of privacy, the ownership and dissemination of data, and helping students understand the credibility of sources.

Join the TLC for a workshop where we will discuss how attendees understand and use social media, explore the implications of using social media in our classes, and think through the digital literacy that these choices can both require and foster. As a group, we will create a repository of questions, tips and resources that could help and assist other educators interested in teaching with social media.

Participants are invited to bring a syllabus, lesson plan, or assignment in which they can envision incorporating social media to enhance learning.

This workshop was offered in Spring 2020 as an in-person workshop. The workshop and materials were developed by Talisa Feliciano and Inés Vañó García.

Materials

All materials on this page and in the linked google document are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License.

This document contains outreach & workshop agenda: Teaching with Social Media

Agenda

11-11:15 Introductions and set up

11:15-11:35 “What is social media?”

Source: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/

Text book is under creative commons license so we can share with participants

Link to a useful graphic. Can be displayed OR printed as a handout: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2015/01/Social-learning-techs-2.jpg

Social media

  • Internet based and a form of computing
  • Main difference between social media and educational learning technologies hosted on the internet is the amount of control user has over learning 
  • Complicated by the corporate realities that user data is often sold and traded
  • What about user privacy?
  • Who owns the data?
  • Digital literacy-how do we train students and ourselves to know about ‘fake news’ uncredible sources?
  • What if you have students that do not use social media because they are not tech orientated?

Share experience teaching with social media

What is a social media informed pedagogy?

11:35-12:00 In What Ways are Social Media Useful in the classroom?

Assess Capacity– when, where, and how social media could be useful:

  • As part of an assignment, lecture? As a final project format? As a case study/examples of potential course content?
  • Dependent on discipline and institution
  • CUNY specific opportunities and challenges
  • Non-standardization across the campuses
  • Opportunities and flexibility in the syllabus
  • ePortfolio at LAGCC requirement for all students: https://eportfolio.laguardia.edu/students.htm

12:00-12:15 Examples of how it has been done:

As a course: http://ds106.us/ 

“Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.

In August-December 2013, we ran an experimental open version of ds106 where… THERE WAS NO TEACHER! What? How is that possible? Learn more about the idea for Headless ds106 and how it planned out including an unexpected group collaboration for the story of GIFACHROME.”

Teaching with Twitter? https://editions.lib.umn.edu/immigrationsyllabus/

In a lecture: @thedreamdefenders; @decolonizethisplace  on IG

In an assignment: https://anth3135.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ using blogs as an assignment 

12:15-12:30 How can we do it?

Individually workshopping where and how to add SM to syllabi, assignments, or lectures that participants bring in 

12:30-12:45

Collectively look over and add any final resources to repository document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vnrx6TK_s1Q4iFUGCZKWLUs8eglB8uvGheajBSDJ7Yw/edit?usp=sharing

12:45-1:00

Final questions and closing out