I have the same privacy issue as Victoria as an instructor. How can we use our social media wisely? When I designed a social interaction through Instagram for my online course, I was looking for a way how to create a closed group first. However, if I want to create a somewhat closed group, the best way was to let classmates share their usernames and follow each other after searching each student on Instagram. What if there are more than 100 students in a class? The best way is to use hashtag. Then, we should set our account public instead of private to use hashtag.
If we only think about networks or relationship among our classmates, we’d better create a closed network within LMS. However, if we want to extend our class discussion using web 2.0 philosophy and technology, we’d better go public with multiple hashtags. Then, should only talk about the serious, academic topics on our social media website? Should we just socialize in a very superficial level filtering all the sensitive information? If we meet f2f, it is just fine, but if we are all online students, we hope to be closer to our classmates using the web 2.0 technology without thinking about privacy.
This is the big problem for me to solve. I want to study how to motivate online students to interact more and know each other better through web 2.0 technologies without or fewer privacy issues.
I have the same concerns as you and am glad to see I am not alone. How do we become social without compromising our privacy?
ReplyDeleteMaybe there's no 'one' big solution...Let's find some better options during this 6 week course together! :-)
DeleteI agree with you that social media, like Twitter, is a powerful tool that allows teachers to connect with their students. Hashtags connect similar topics and conversations and by using them, you extend the reach of your instructional messages. Some of the ideas to use hashtags for the classroom are: Have your students engage in class discussion through the use of Twitter; Create a topic hashtag for your class and have your students tweet answers to questions posted on the class Twitter account; Have your student track the hashtag for upcoming events, assignments and announcements; You can also use your hashtag to host weekly, monthly or quarterly events where distinguished guests, connected educators or anybody you invite can come and have an online discussion on Twitter. Here are some successful education hashtags you can follow to get more ideas: #edtech #edapp #edreform #elearning #mlearning #ntchat. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteWow! Thank you so much for the good information and ideas! I can follow one of the hashtags for my community observation. :-)
Delete