Students don't use email. So why do we keep emailing them?

Students like social media (via Mindshift)

Imagine you were born in 1995. You would have been three years old when Google launched in 1998. You would have been five at that millenium party you went to. Nine when Facebook arrived in February 2004. Eleven when Twitter arrived in March 2006.

Why would you have set up an email account? To activate your social network profiles of course! And how many of your teenage friends would have been sending you excited status updates via email? Probably not very many.

I make this point because I've been having conversations with students recently around their perception of email. As each year goes by, the demographic of students moves on another year - next year most of the new arrivals will have been born in 1996. Then 1997. And they will be even more bewildered by the university's constant attempts to contact them via email.

I accept that 'students don't use email' is a generalisation - of course some students do use email. But the vast majority are more active on social networks than are busily ploughing through their university inboxes, so is it any wonder that tutors and administrators get frustrated when students say 'I don't check my university email' or 'I didn't get your email'?

There is a point to be made about the extent to which universities are responsible for educating students about the conventions of email. After all, after graduating they will be entering a world in which email is still a key means of communicating. But social media is revolutionising the way in which organisations and businesses communicate both internally and externally. So do we not have an equal responsibility to educate students about the ways to use social media effectively and appropriately?

Social media is a democratising form of communication in that it gives anyone a voice. So it's interesting to consider the above argument in the context of the recent video (one of many) about the Future of Higher Education:

 
Many of the points made by participants in this video are not new: "more collaboration", "more accessible", "greater ability to learn at your own pace" etc. If the sector truly believes in 'student-centred learning', a concept which is easy to say yet not so easy to deliver, then communicating with students via social media is an important way to demonstrate that the sector is prepared to embrace the change that is coming. 

Paolo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed proposed a 'new relationship between student, teacher and society' which treats the learner as a 'co-creator of knowledge'. The book was first published in 1968, thirty years before Google, nearly forty before Facebook. And yet much of Higher Education still operates in a very top-down manner with students very much as the 'recipients' of knowledge rather than co-creators.

In the same way as the music industry, Higher Education will experience a revolution. And the more strongly we resist the change that our students demand, the more uncomfortable that revolution will be.

Thanks to David Hopkins for sharing the video on his blog.

Using Twitter for a group learning activity

Twitter is a useful tool on many levels, but I recently had the opportunity to use it as a way to support a group learning activity. Here's how it worked.

The object of the activity was to try and make a PESTLE analysis more interesting for a 100 1st year Fashion students. If you're not familiar with the term, PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental, and is a way to analyse the ways in which these factors affect a market, product or service. The activity involved taking the students to London and setting them the task of visiting places across the capital that reflected each of these areas, so Political might be the Houses of Parliament, Economic could be Canary Wharf for example. The challenge was to be able to track the students' activity and verify that they had visited places for each PESTLE element.

The activity

Students were divided into sixteen groups and each group was allocated a hashtag ranging from #PESTLE1 through to #PESTLE16. The students were required to use their smartphones to take pictures of each place they visited and send a Tweet which included their group hashtag. The students had to tweet a group photo of themselves holding a copy of the Metro newspaper to prove that they had all attended on the required day.

The course team took up residence in a coffee shop, each tutor was allocated three groups to monitor and the tutor was responsible for replying to messages from their respective groups. Using the Hootsuite social media dashboard, it was possible to set up columns for each group to make it easier to follow their progress. As the tweets came in, a screenshot was taken of each tweet and at the end of the day these screenshots were dropped into iPhoto. This made is possible to quickly generate a slideshow of all the best tweets - see video below.

 
The feedback from the students indicated that they very much enjoyed the activity, and the discursive nature of Twitter provided an effective way for the tutors to communicate with the students. Hootsuite made it possible to track and monitor the activity of each group.

Do you have an example of using Twitter for group work? If so share it below!

Social Media 101

Great presentation from Matthew Draycott providing an introduction to Social Media.

The Social Media Garden

The rapid growth of social media is creating new and complex challenges for organisations. As classic examples of disruptive innovation, social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter are forcing individuals and organisations to re-examine their methods of working and communication.

And they're not about to disappear overnight. So what are some of the challenges that social media presents for organisations? An informative piece of research - called the Social Media Garden - provides a valuable contribution to this debate. Here is a Slideshare of the final report:

The Social Media Garden Report from The Denovati Group

The research puts forward some interesting concepts such as 'Leadership 2.0', the qualities of which include "embracing change, being open to experimenting, demonstrating transparency, fostering a culture of innovation, open to the voice of the people, stimulating sharing, acknowledgment of expertise, working collaboratively and creating dialogue". And the researchers go on to suggest that "use of Web 2.0 will only be successful in an organisation if Leadership 2.0 is in place". I'm inclined to agree.

I particularly like the method of data collection. As the researcher states at the start of the report, it makes sense to conduct a study on social media using a more 'social' methodology than the traditional survey. This short video explains how the Social Media Garden, developed by Hybrid Wisdom Labs, works:

And all of the above is testament to the power of the open community - thank you to Tracy Gravesande and Robin Heyden for sharing the above resources!

Death of the lecture

A recent article in The Chronicle picked up on Harvard's recent financial splurge on new approaches to teaching. The motivation for the splurge was the growing that the traditional teaching method in Higher Education - the lecture - was failing to achieve its goals of "prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context".

One would hope that Harvard has not just woken up to the scholarship of Teaching and Learning and its potential to enhance student learning. But the article does highlight the problem that tutors, usually highly qualified and with many years' experience, often lack the confidence to experiment with new approaches to classroom teaching. Add the use of new technologies into the mix and these tutors are even more likely to retreat to the safety of 'doing what they have always done'.

As a Learning Technologist I have always strived to focus on the pedagogy of e-Learning when recommending activities to tutors. Another article in the Chronicle illustrated that technology for technology's sake is unlikely to yield a better learning experience for students and while this approach may succeed, it is also just as likely to fail. The article spoke of a technophile tutor who after many years of extolling the virtues of new technologies to his colleagues is now focusing on what he believes to be even more important: the bond between tutor and student, and the need for the former to nurture the latter rather than talking down to them. Above all, the article highlighted the need for learning to be a participatory experience.

If tutors do decide to experiment with new participatory technologies there is a significant risk that their attempts will fail due to inexperience. And for those who have always simply 'given lectures' the idea of using new technologies to increase participation is often perceived as either irrelevant or terrifying. Providing tutors with practical templates that explain how this can be achieved through the use of technologies such as social media, video and interactive activities would therefore help give them the confidence to try new approaches to supporting their students. I've been searching for a while now and haven't found any such templates - if anybody has come across something similar please feel free to share. Otherwise I think I've found what I'm going to be doing for the next few months...

Making collaborative work work - Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche sets out three principles that underpin successful collaboration in the workplace:

http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/making-collaborative-work-work/

Social Makes Employees Smarter

Good infographic courtesy of Jane Hart identifying the advantages of social media and communities in organisations:

http://blogs.newsgator.com/everyday_enterprise_20/2012/02/social-makes-employees-smarter-faster-.html

You can't train people to be social - Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche summarises the difficulties in training people to engage with social media and provides a useful list of pointers for creating a supportive social environment.

http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/you-simply-cant-train-people-to-be-social/

Getting to Social - Harold Jarche

Harold Jarche explores the idea that use of social media is comparable to using a new language - you have to start at the beginning and experience it for yourself in order to understand its values and conventions:

http://www.jarche.com/2012/02/getting-to-social/

Understanding Conceptualisation: The process you go through before you launch an online community

A useful checklist from Richard Millington describing the preparation involved in setting up and launching and online community:

http://www.feverbee.com/2012/02/conceptualization.html

Social Networked Learning in complex information environments

A great presentation by George Siemens examining the changing nature of information organisation:

Social Networked Learning

View more PowerPoint from gsiemens

Community lessons

A useful post by Harold Jarche summarising some of the main points about online communities:

http://www.jarche.com/2012/01/community-lessons/

Community management: planning the week

A useful timetable by Richard Millington to help Community Managers plan their activity for the week:

http://www.feverbee.com/2012/01/planning-the-week.html

He also provides a useful Community Management Map which describes the four stages of online community development: inception, establishment, maturity and mitosis.

Guidelines for facilitating a successful online community

Great guidelines for building, facilitating and moderating a successful online community:

http://us2.campaign-archive.com/?u=b48c9db4770dd18be6455be99&id=2198baceaa

Introduction to social networking - Harold Jarche

Another great post by Harold Jarche which gives a comprehensive introduction to social networking:

http://www.jarche.com/2010/06/introduction-to-social-networking/

The evolution of blogging

A great post which highlights the growing concern over social media sites such as Facebook and their level of control over data:

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/13/the-evolution-of-blogging/

Students like social media, but schools are cautious...

An infographic with some thought provoking statistics regarding American students' usage and expectations of social media.

Social Learning: A Future For Learning

A provocative presentation that illustrates how the transition from analogue to digital is revolutionising learning and challenging educators to keep up.

Social Learning

View more presentations from TribalCafe

Top 100 Articles of 2011

A great post from Jane Hart listing her top 100 social learning articles from 2011.

Top 100 Articles of 2011

A New Culture of Learning

An excellent presentation by Judy O-Connell that explores the changing nature of the Web and the ways in which these changes will impact on teaching and learning:

New culture of learning

View more presentations from Judy O'Connell

Many thanks to Jane Hart for bring attention to this presentation.