Do students want their instructors to participate in their social media activity?
Do students engage more when their instructors participate in their communication or just observe?
In my pilot study, I asked students to use Instagram and interact freely without instructors. It was because I thought that it was more natural and that students will prefer interacting with their fellow students rather than their teacher or TA. However, while I am tweeting for this course, I found it seems more vibrant when our instructor actively posted and commented on students tweets. The Friday challenge was intriguing., too.
I hope to compare two scenarios with and without instructors' participation in my study some day.
I think it encourages students to participate in class discussions when the instructor is involved. They get to interact with their instructor in a different way...on an equal level in some ways. My issue has been the privacy aspect; for this reason, I have only used discussion boards within our course LMS. When I teach Continuing Ed ESOL courses, we do not have that access. I have been hesitant to use Twitter or other apps for that reason.
ReplyDeleteYes I agree. Privacy really matters when we apply technology (especially social media) to our education. But things changed a lot...We are getting more open and connected...not live in a closed network anymore...I think we need to find how to mitigate this more open/networked vs privacy issue for our education.
DeleteWow, this is super interesting. I would say that by being a younger teacher, I struggle with this aspect in my life. My students would love to interact with each other on social media, but I am scared because I know wht they are capable of doing in a negative way. They show so much interest in my life, and I would agree that when I am more involved, they tend to participate more. This would be great to find way to interact with them while also teaching them to be aware of who can see their posts on social media.
ReplyDeleteYes! This is not an easy question for both students and teachers...As you mentioned, teachers may not want to disclose too much personal information to their students. I know some of my friends who are college professors have some students follower on their Facebook. They may be very cautious when they post something on Facebook. There's no border between personal and public life on the Social Media. Shall we use different accounts for every community we are involved? Maybe that's not the solution...Let's think about it...
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