"#Hashtags in the Academy" at #scio13 on Storify

@Lalsox and my session called #Hashtags in the academy: Engaging students with social media was a great success! We had lots of great conversation which generated some (unanswered) questions as well as some terrific ideas about using social media in the classroom.

Several attendees talked about using social media with their college / graduate students. Ideas like:

• @Cotesia1 / Marianne Alleyne has her Insect Physiology students create a "twitter lecture" in 25 tweets. Here's her Storify of those lectures. 
• @WhySharksMatter / David Shiffman has done a similar assignment with his marine biology students. Next time he teaches it, he promises to Storify them. 
• @2footgiraffe / Adam Taylor set up #scistuchat to encourage his high school students to chat with scientists via Twitter.
• @MelanieTbaum / Melanie Tannenbaum has just started using Twitter with her social psychology class: : @UIUCPsych201 Hashtag: #PSYC201.

There was additional discussion about students' digital footprint now and in the future and some unanswered questions. 

Take a peek at the Storify and feel free to comment on here or Twitter (using #tagacad). I'll add useful tweets to the Storify.

Engaging Students with Social Media, #TagAcad preso at #scio13

I'm so excited to be facilitating a conversation at ScienceOnline 13 called #Hashtags in the Academy: Engaging Students with Social Media with Lali DeRosier.

We want to talk with attendees -- as well as others around the interwebs -- about the role of social media in the high school and undergraduate classroom. 

Is it possible to engage students with Web 2.0 tools in ways that meaningfully support learning?  We will moderate a conversation about what’s worked and what hasn’t with social media in the classroom. 

Because it's ScienceOnline, we want the session to be reflective of the audience's interest / experiences, so Lali and I are going to be tweeting some questions to get the conversation started.

The questions are below ... Lali will tweet & Storify the first few questions, and I'll tweet & Storify the last few. Feel free to comment here or to reply to one of the upcoming tweets.

Librarians, I'm also interested in how y'all use social media to engage with your students, whether in a specific class or your discipline or your library as a whole. Comments from other non-teaching academics also welcome!

If you do comment, please use the hashtags #scio13 #TagAcad so Lali and I can track your comments.

Questions

• Do you use social media to engage with your students?
• What was your biggest social media success in the classroom? Failure?
• To what extent should social media be embedded in curriculum? Or used to supplement the curriculum?
• Are some social media tools more academic than others?
• How can we help students navigate their personal vs. academic / professional personas?
• How important is social media to our students’ future? As they consider jobs and/or graduate school?
• How does social media advance the content of the courses?
• Does social media improve the efficiency of communication?

• If you aren’t using social media to teach, what would make you start? 

Thanks for your feedback!

Good Reading!

I joined Goodreads a few months back, and for some reason, that's motivated me to read more. Actually, I can't prove causation - only correlation. Perhaps I joined Goodreads because I wanted to read more. Or because I was reading more, I joined Goodreads.

Anyway, there is something very satisfying about marking books "read" on Goodreads. Additionally, GoodReads is a nice way to save books I want to read, instead of collecting titles on scraps of paper or in my email.

There's no real relation to cognitive science, as my books are primarily mid-list women's fiction, with an occasional science fiction (or even cognitive science fiction) thrown in. No mysteries, no non-fiction.

Here are the last five:

Recently Read

The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

The Red House: A Novel

by Mark Haddon

September

by Rosamunde Pilcher

Women of the Silk

by Gail Tsukiyama

Engaging Audiences via Social Media (shoutout to #scio12)

teamwork 1, from stock.xchng

I'm facilitating a class tonight on how to increase visibility and evaluating response to a blog. The class is a group of students in the Interdisciplinary Health Communication program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They run the blog Upstream (go take a look!), which has "the goal of encouraging dialogue and debate on health communication."

I'm going to discuss two elements important to all bloggers / Twitterers, both in the library and in the science community (and other communities too, of course):

1. How to improve visibility of your blog (Twitter / other social media)
2. How to evaluate the response to your blog

To address these issues,  I plan to morph two great sessions I saw at the 2012 Science Online conference.

To improve visibility folks need to be talking about or sharing your content. Emily Finke and Kevin Zelnio's #scio12 session Understanding audiences and how to know when you are *really* reaching out helped me generate the following questions for the class:

• What would improving visibility look like? 
• More hits on your blog?
• More shared blog posts?
• More comments on the blog?
• The audience raised some excellent points about using blog comments to make assessments about your blog itself. These include:
• Sharing (retweeting or emailing to others) vs. commenting on a blog post
• Many barriers to commenting on blogs, such as:
• Comments are longer-lasting, possibly contentious
• Comments requiring login serves as an additional barrier
• Commenting is tough on a mobile phone
• Tweets are more ephemeral, and sharing with people you've chosen
• Based on these questions, are comments a good way of assessing visibility?
• One audience member suggested that a good way of increasing reach would be to translate your blog into another language.  This would be important if you wanted a to reach a group for whom English is not the first language.

It's also important to communicate back and forth with your audience on your blog and via Twitter.

I've collected a lot of links to help evaluate the response to your social media presence, which are on my library guide Assessing Social Media Campaigns.  Many of these links were identified by the ScienceOnline session The Attention Economy and Influence Metrics by Adrian J. Ebsary and Lou Woodley. Handy links include 

• Website Grader, analyzes websites for SEO, readability, links, and more. 
• TwitSprout, which track social media activity for your Twitter account.
• TweetPsych creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to the thousands already in the database on categories such as learning, work, media
• SnapBird doesn't assess your media reach, but it does store the last 3,000 tweets from any Twitter account. Handy for assessing comments about a brand or campaign from a known account.

Lots more to talk about -- I'm sure we won't cover all of these points in the class, but at least it's a good outline.  I plan to share some ideas from the students in a future blog post.

See Also

• Zelnio, Kevin. On Naïveté Among Scientists Who Wish to Communicate | EvoEcoLab, Scientific American Blog Network. Oct. 4, 2011.
• Wilcox, Christie. Social Media for Scientists Part 1: It’s Our Job | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network. Sept. 27, 2011
• Finke, Emily and Kevin Zelnio. Understanding audiences and how to know when you are *really* reaching out (video). Presentation at Science Online 2012. Jan. 20, 2012.