Social Pedagogies: Motivating Students through Authentic Audiences
I led a workshop on social pedagogies, with a focus on social media tools that support such pedagogies, at Elon University this afternoon. This was my first full-length workshop on this topic, and I had a blast leading it. Two big reasons: a group of very engaged Elon faculty with a mix of experiences and skills in social media, and a well-equipped classroom. Have you seen those giant, portable white boards, the ones that are about six feet tall and eight feet wide? We call them “work walls” at my center, and this classroom had not one, not two, but FOUR work walls. This made it really easy to get the workshop participants out of their seats and interacting with each other.
Here’s my Prezi for the talk. You can move through the Prezi by clicking on the forward button, or you can use your mouse to zoom and pan freely through the canvas. And be sure to click on any links you see for more info on the various examples I used.
Social Pedagogies: Motivating Students through Authentic Audiences on Prezi
During the first half of the workshop, I introduced four social media tools that can be used to support social pedagogies: course blogs, social bookmarking, backchannels, and social networks. Then, during the work wall activity, I asked the participants to brainstorm responses to the following questions for each tool:
- Pros – Why might you use this tool in your teaching?
- Cons – What questions or concerns do you have about this tool?
- Apps – What’s an application you see for this tool in your teaching?
The Elon faculty and staff in attendance jumped right into this activity and generated a lot of ideas and opinions. I promised them I would share their work here on the blog. Here are the pros, cons, and apps they identified for social networks (Facebook, Flickr):
(Click on any of these images to see a larger version.)
Here’s their work on backchannels (primarily Twitter):
And social bookmarking (Diigo, Pinterest):
And course blogs:
Thanks to Elon for hosting me this week and for letting me participate in so many interesting conversations.