Review of "Using social media for academic good" by Stephanie Trunzo

Stephanie Trunzo's talk "Pedagogical Facebook and Twitter? Using social media for academic good" covered the use of several well-known technologies “where students are.” The main idea is that online courses are looking for ways to get students authentically engaged with the course material and classmates and one way to encourage that is to go to them instead of having them come to a learning management system. The questions from the NCSU audience show that many people, including me, are worried about privacy issues and information ownership. Benefits to using a facebook group for an online course per Trunzo:

• better engages students because discussion responses go to email so they don’t forget to go back and it keeps the conversation going.
• easier for students to add resources themselves
• closed invitation only facebook group provides student privacy

One of the technologies she used that I think could be easily implemented and could be useful for students include have a Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) room available for the whole semester so students can use it to collaborate.  Another interesting things she talked about was her students’ desire for audio content. She does a weekly podcast, basically reading the written material she provides. This, to me, seems redundant. She mentions that it’s worth it to reach students with different learning styles and preferences. I would encourage instructors to have a variety of content (text, audio, video, image) that reinforces, broadens, and provides context for each other in each week instead of duplicating content. The use of twitter as course announcements was also interesting.

Collaborative editing tools are something I actually do not use much. I’m old fashioned in that I still use Microsoft Word and track changes. I’m not a huge fan of wikis. I think I have trust issues ;) I think the use of delicious “communal tagging” bookmarks for class readings are fascinating and could be implemented easily. It's something I will definitely mention to faculty.