Tuesday 18 September 2018

incorporating social media and back-channel communication

I am beginning to be less and less concerned with online learning. Before I used to consider it to be inferior to what was happening face-to-face. But now, I think it is just a different mode of the educational medium. As Brookfield suggests in this 11th chapter, the F2F classes rarely live up to the billing or potential. Classroom teaching can be executed well or poorly. Online teaching is the same. But I do wonder if the best online learning experience can be favourably compared to the best F2F learning environment? Perhaps the issue is that it is so context dependent being affected by the skills and inclinations of the teacher, the student cohort, and discipline being studied.

Regardless, Brookfield, similar to Bowen, suggests that we make use of whatever educational tools are at our disposal if they make sense in terms of facilitating student learning. For Brookfield, social media and back-channel communication is a teaching tool that can facilitate democratization of the classroom by enabling quieter students to provide input toward the educational environment. In addition, it provides a conduit to instructors for the lens of students’ voices when critically reflecting on our teaching. The advantage here is that it can happen in real time as we are teaching. Critical to its success in conveying students’ voices is that students be permitted to log in with an anonymous name/handle/identifier. I am not sure how I feel about that. I tire of the social irresponsibility that happens with anonymous posting to blogs and online articles. I think we need to take personal responsibility for our expressed thoughts. I understand that Brookfield is making the case that anonymity is crucial for enabling students to feel safe in voicing their concerns or confusion but I have witnessed so many examples of online conversations descending to ad hominem. On the other hand, the classroom environment may have sufficient social constraints that students will regulate themselves. There will be those who want to learn rather than read vulgarity or needless harassment of other students or the instructor. Brookfield does assert that it is necessary to lay the ground rules for using social media as a back-channel to the instructor for questions/issues. Some of the examples he cites I have seen used well in instructional workshops: TodaysMeet, Twitter, PollEverywhere, among others. I wonder if my own LMS, Moodle has anything similar? The Forum module in Moodle is simply too slow/cumbersome to act as a back-channel. Are there other social media equivalents in Moodle?

Brookfield also makes the case that social media is good for the lens of our colleagues. We can allow our colleagues access to our online record or to even observe the social media feeds to get a taste of our teaching without the necessity of being physically in our classrooms.

I do wonder, however, if these teaching strategies and educational technology tools are as significant for my smaller classes? I think they could work well in my first-yr biology courses for which student enrolment is typically between 70-90 students. But in my more senior courses, the enrolment smaller: 30-50 in 2nd yr and 10-20 for 3rd and 4th year. Maybe in the 2nd year, but I don’t think it makes sense in my smaller enrolment courses at the 3rd and 4th yr. Also, using social media assumes that my classroom does not have many moments in which I am circulating among students as they work and discuss a problem. I can see social media use working very well when I am lecturing - it still happens often enough - but not when students are working in their groups. I get around to them when they have a confusion that needs clarification.

Bottom line, I think, is that social media can be a useful teaching and learning tool but that it requires judicious use that is context-dependent. I like Jose Bowen’s suggestion - ask the students what they want/need to support their own learning. Many of my students have indicated that they do not particularly like learning online. But I wonder if what they are really saying is that they do not like the work of learning - online teaching, done well,  typically requires reading and deep processing. Or I wonder if what they are indicating is that they view their online world as their personal world and they desire to keep it separate from their more formal learning world?

Not sure…

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