June continued-Social Media

I have some thoughts to share on our focus on social media in the class over the last 2 weeks. There were many good readings and discussion posts on Social Media in the classroom that I found extremely insightful and very thought provoking.

The powerful tools of social media are amazing and the opportunities seem to be endless. For one of our discussions. I am very interested in social media and believe it can be very useful for us in distance education so I found this week of our study more interesting than the last week. I found all of the statistics on the website personalizemedia.com fascinating. Gary’s social media count had some staggering statistics on everything from how many pictures are posted on facebook daily (50 million) to you tube daily video counts (3 billion).

One of our discussions came from reviewing inspiring ways for us to use social media in the classroom. I am not currently a teacher, but plan to work in training at work after my studies, and found some of the ideas very useful. I have done some training at work and am also in the mentoring program, so this week was so helpful to me for my job. Everybody in class listed several tips that they found useful, and I must say I have one favorite of the ones that I listed. Following mentors is my #1 pick, which suggests that we follow professors, mentors, or other important people in our field of study to find out about their research and professional activities. Since starting at UMUC I did join twitter and follow some of the DE scholars and Professors and their tweets lead me to articles that have helped me in class or given me food for thought. I read Terry Anderson’s article on how useful some of the social media tools are in the classroom, and I agree that sharing ideas and tips is a benefit of all the social media tools for both students and teachers. One of the points everyone discussed in our boards was having a secure environment to share knowledge. With the web changing so fast, I agree this is a concern.

 The writing coach in this class proved to be such a blessing for me in this module. Since I have been out of school for years, I struggle with writing papers. I am so very grateful that we have a writing coach and she really gave me some excellent critique on my paper that gave me the opportunity to improve it before submitting the final assignment. I handed in my draft which I based on lack of quality control in asynchronous technology in distance education. The gist of what I wanted to convey was that the advances in asynchronous technology have exploded over the past decade in DE, and quality control is needed to ensure that DE can keep up with the changes while delivering a quality product. The writing coach pointed out how I needed to reorganize my thoughts in the paper more succinctly and made some excellent points of what I needed to fix and improve upon. It really helped me reorganize and refocus on the final product of the paper. 

The readings I found in researching the paper gave me more insight into the design of discussion boards, and future progress. One suggestion in one of the articles was about all universities having a more structured design of discussion boards in order to be able to save them digitally, catalog them, and have them available for future access in classes and research for students and faculty.

 http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/05/100-inspiring-ways-to-use-social-media-in-the-classroom/

http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/

Anderson, T. (2009) Social networking in Education. A draft paper to stride handbook for the Indira Gandhi National Open University.  http://terrya.edublogs.org/2009/04/28/social-networking-chapter/