#UDsfi15 Teaching With Social Media Platforms

Pink – describe your favorite assignment

Yellow – what do you want to accomplish in this workshop

Blue – what is it about social media that excites you or scares you or ….

Over the years I created many assignments designed to get students to do close readings of historical sources and to try to imagine themselves in a historical era. That meant at time giving speeches in class as historical figures or authoring documents in their voices.  When I saw the New York Times Disunion blog (which started in the fall of 2010), I started asking students live blog a historical event, but not on the web because we were all too nervous about that. 

Four plus years ago when I joined Twitter, I started thinking about how to repurpose social media to do the same sort of thing, and I devised an assignment I called Experiments in Live Tweeting as a Historical Figure.  That eventually spread across many different platforms (figure above) and became If Historical Figures Had Social Media (figure above).  None of the platforms are meant to be used by educators, although Wikipedia as a knowledge-centered site has evolved towards that with their educational foundation.

This means that the platforms have to be tweaked, but in so far as students will often carry these technologies with them and interact with them frequently, I am willing to work within them (figure above).  Social media sites also have considerable reach and put far more resources into their development than any LMS ever could making them attractive for outward facing teaching.  

Hack – For example these platforms are designed to be used by individuals.   For both ease and to address privacy concerns I often make a class account that we all share using same login and password (pinterest) This means of course students have to sign or in some other way indicate who did what work if I choose to grade them.

Repurpose – Social media sites aren’t necessarily meant to be used in a classroom, but often have some wonderful features.  Snapchat for example has just created a story function. It disappears after 24 hours, but that medium is quite tempting for the ephemeral aspects of history.  It took some doing, but I created a snapchat story for Emily Dickinson’s poetry, as a sort of educational social media campaign centered around the theme of ghostliness in her poetry.  Similar, I created an Instagram campaign focused on the image of Dickinson since Instagram is so associated with the selfie. 

In addition to professor generated content, which students can be asked to respond to, students can of course be asked to generate their own content.  This is an excellent way of teaching informational literacy as it involves not only researching content, but also clarifying copyright and fair use issues and figuring out how to source all of this. 

I also love the visual aspect of Pinterest for a shared research site, largely as reference software can be used.  In that case Pinterest allows multiple contributors to one board through a laborious invite an individual. 

Hijack – Pinterest is largely associated with consumerism and aspirational life styles but when I learned it had a heavily tilted female user base and a significant presence of k-12 teachers I was determined to use it. I did some work for the Alice Paul Institute figuring out how virtual tours or lesson plans might work.  

In the process I realized how negative the images of women were on Pinterest so I came up with a social media campaign centered around women’s equality day to do with my classes.  

Remix- Working with existing content is an interesting way to have students interact publicly.  Correct a pin is an assignment that only I’ve done, but that we will start this fall in US history.  I was troubled by the number of plantations that were pinned to wedding planning boards as potential venues so I decided to repin with historical information about the site.  The original pinner removed the pin leaving only mine. 

Remediate – the more I worked in Pinterest the more I became aware of how unsourced much of the material was. In correcting the information on some pins (like one that identifies Emmeline Pankhurst as Alice Paul that simply will not go away) I started thinking of this as a way for students to work in social media across various platform, either sourcing information or correcting errors.  This works equally well with Wikipedia, and the two in conjunction make for a really interesting assignment.

Some jumping off points for teaching in social media.

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