Social Pedagogies (#THE2013)

And here’s the Prezi for my concurrent session at the Technology in Higher Education conference in Qatar, “Social Pedagogies: Motivating Students through Social Media and Authentic Audiences.” Click the forward button to move through my presentation as I plan to deliver it, or use your mouse to pan and zoom freely about the canvas.

Update: Jenn Wicks from the Teaching and Learning Centre at the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar captured my talk through graphic recording:

For more of Jenn’s excellent graphic recording, see her blog.

3 Responses to "Social Pedagogies (#THE2013)"

Chris Heard says:

April 19, 2013 at 1:27 pm

I love the idea of using social pedagogies, but have some reservations or obstacles. (1) Do these pedagogies raise FERPA concerns, since students’ work is on public display with personal identifiers attached? (2) Some of my undergraduate students seem reluctant to use social media. They don’t voluntarily blog or tweet, although they do post Facebook status updates. They seem to prefer point-to-point communication like text messaging. Do the social pedagogies described simply move students from one set of unfamiliar landmarks to another? (3) Is there or will there be an audio track? (4) Any tips for operationalizing what we see in this presentation?

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Derek Bruff says:

April 25, 2013 at 9:14 am

Great questions, Chris. I’ll see what I can do to answer them.

1) Yes, these pedagogies raise FERPA concerns. Short version: The fact that student X is enrolled in course Y is protected by FERPA, and so requiring students to blog, tweet, whatever publicly as a part of a course is problematic. My solution (and, it should be said, I am not a lawyer) is to give students the option to use pseudonyms. That way, they get to decide if they want to disclose their enrollment in my course publicly. As I understand it, the work that students do (the blog posts, the tweets, etc.) is NOT protected by FERPA, so there’s no problem sharing that work publicly. For more on this, see Chris Clark’s excellent post on respecting FERPA.

2) I can see how social media might be unfamiliar territory for students, but I’m not sure what the “other” unfamiliar territory would be for students. Asking students to represent their knowledge in the form of a five-paper paper only read by their instructor is pretty familiar territory for students, I think. If the “other” unfamiliar territory you had in mind was a course management system like Blackboard, then, yes, I agree that can be just as new to students as some social media tools.

When I talk about using social media in teaching, one point I make is that these tools can be used to connect students to authentic audiences: each other, audiences outside the course. That’s a good reason to use social media in teaching. Not such a good reason: because students are “digital natives” who know how to use these tools. As you point out, it’s not the case that all students are savvy with social media, and, more importantly, one should have a strong pedagogical reason for using a particular technology. Using something *only* because students are familiar with it seems to be missing the point.

With the goal of connecting students to authentic audiences in mind, using tools for doing so that are unfamiliar to students can be challenging, but also worth it. Here’s a comparison: At some point in my middle school career, I had a teacher ask me to write a letter to my local newspaper. That was a new genre and medium for me, but learning that genre and medium was (a) one of the objectives of the activity and (b) necessary to reach the other objectives. I think social media can function similarly. Students may have to learn a new genre and medium, but that’s often worth it.

3) No plans at the moment for an audio track, but if you click through the links embedded in the Prezi, you’ll get some more details on the examples I shared.

4) I would start small. Find one week in your course where you can embed an activity that uses some of these ideas. It might not be worth teaching your students how to use Twitter for one activity, but you could use Facebook if it’s more familiar to your students. That’s what Paul Hanstedt did recently, asking his students to livetweet their viewing of a movie, inspired by the Mark Sample example I shared in my presentation.

Or you could build in one low stakes, out-of-class mechanism for students to earn “class participation” points, like social bookmarking. Taking 15 minutes of class to teach students how to use a social bookmarking site might be worth it if they use the tool in productive ways over the length of the semester.

I hope these answers are useful! Thanks for commenting.

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CFP: Journal Issue on Teaching the Middle Ages and Renaissance with New Techniques and Technologies | MASSachusetts State Universities MEDIEVAL Blog says:

May 28, 2013 at 9:33 am

[…] Need some ideas? This is an interesting Prezi designed by Derek Bruff on Social Pedagogies. These are BY FAR not the only techniques/technologies relevant to this journal issue, but it might […]

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