Social Media in Education: Twitter being used in Arts and Sciences Courses

Part 5 in the Series: Social Media in Education

Social Media can be embedded into a number of different courses and it’s always good to find unique research and actually case studies available to help you develop a plan. It’s not always easy find these types of ideas, practices, and real world examples. One of the books (very similar to a textbook) I found on this showcases real case studies and examples. Teaching Arts and Sciences with the New Social Media by Charles Wankel (2011) in one of those types of books that package it with various examples geared towards certain areas of study.

One of the examples is by Brian Croxall (@briancroxall ) who is using Twitter in his ENG 456 Reading Technology course to engage his student with social media in an age of new media. This is a month long Twitter-related assignment after he has already spent time with students discussing media systems. After gaining foundation requirements, the students are to follow the class account “Croxall” and other members of the class, posting at least once a day for a month and using the course hashtag #eng465. Croxall focused on having students play with Twitter and see if it changes the culture or society of the class in any appreciable way.

The final assignment is for students to write up an evaluation of the assignment and what Twitter teaches about community and media. This assignment would be a low-stake, low-entry form of social media to implement into a course for the first time.

It’s always a great idea to have a possible alternative assignment for students against social media or giving their information to outside companies. This could be to compose an academic essay of equivalent length to the approximate words a student would tweet in a month for a minimum of one post a day. I think the majority of the students would choose to tweet.

For more great example on new media in the practice, and actually details of this type of assignment, check out the case studies in Teaching Arts and Sciences with the New Social Media, Wankel C. (2011)

Want to read more about social media in education?

• Part 1 Social Media in Education: Group Project on Raising Awareness
• Part 2 Social Media in Education: Google+ Database Management
• Part 3 Teaching and Learning with Social Media: Social Media 101 for Faculty
• Part 4 Social Media in Education: Privacy and Friending