I confess I never wanted to teach. Teaching requires patience and this 1959 model came with faulty patience. Plus how would I connect with a room full of 20 year olds? I believe in personal responsibility, but I wasn't hearing positive stories about the personal responsibility of students. I just didn't see this teaching thing as a likely career path for me. Then the carrot was dangled in front of me. Young doctor Smith (no I'm not young, but the title is new to me) do you want to teach Media and Diversity? How could I turn that down? Me who believes in personal responsibility pass up the chance to open a dialog about diversity with a group of young people? I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't take the opportunity.
Enter Social Media
Okay, confession #2...Twitter is a bit like the holy grail for me. You might say I am a tad bit obsessed. In general I’m fascinated by the ways people engage with social media. I find that Twitter has replaced many traditional news outlets for me. I immediately go to Twitter for breaking news, and it has also become a staple for research. When I need to generate ideas on a topic, my first search engine becomes Twitter. I’ve anxiously followed Dannah Boyd’s work. Her dissertation on social media use by digital natives is riveting. When I was offered the chance to teach a Media and Diversity at the University of Tennessee in Spring 2010, I immediately began devising my plan to incorporate microblogging into my curriculum.
First I polled the other professors in the department. Who was using social media tools? Who eschewed technology? Who was interested but didn’t know where to begin? Admittedly, I am an early adopter. New technologies intrigue me. My intrinsic need to explore drives my adoption. It is really a basic uses and gratification argument. I want to immediate immerse myself in the technology, but will quickly cast it off if it does not offer the instant gratification I seek. But back to the teaching. Those open to technology use in the classroom encouraged me. Others didn’t so much discourage me, but didn’t lead me to believe that there might be a pay off and in fact it might not be worth the time or the effort. However, as a newbie I decided to jump headlong into my Twitter experiment thinking that I’d just abandon it if it got out of hand.
#Fail
I am firmly committed to self-directed learning. I assign readings that are not specifically covered in class, but students are required to discuss them on examinations and apply them in other written assignments. I post help documents to the course website and inform the students that the material is available for their use, but it is the students’ responsibility to explore and apply the information. However, with the Twitter assignment I didn’t spend enough time explaining hashtags. In retrospect I think my students missed out on an important aspect of the Twitter interface. I required they hashtag their tweets for class with the course number so that I could aggregate the feed each week for a grade, but I didn't fully explain the power of hashtagging. Secondly, I gave them free reign on topics thinking that most would tie their tweets to topics we discussed in class. I was wrong. About half the class tweeted aimlessly about nothing which took up an unbelievable amount of my time when grading and brought little added value to the classroom discussion.
Finding Your Voice
At the beginning of the semester I tell my students that I see them as adults, and I expect them to act like adults. I’m okay with the idea of tweeting during class. If you can tweet, text, Facebook and pay attention to the class discussion, rock on! With this mindset you have to be willing to indulge a bit of youthful banter. While I don’t need to know about each drama of my undergraduates’ lives, it is important to allow them to find their voices. I had to reign in the multitasking by joining the discussion from time to time, but overall the students used the tools productively. Sometimes a timid student might be more comfortable tweeting than speaking during class. Sometimes students extended the class discussion by tweeting while we were viewing videos. Many times outside of class someone would tweet an idea that related to a topic from weeks earlier. I always wanted to exclaim, “You get it!. You really get it!”
At the end of the semester I lamented that about one third of the students in a large class simply don’t care, about one third just needs the class to graduate, and about one third really get it. If only I could divide and conquer then I could apply my energies in the proper place and really reach out to the students who have an interest in the subject matter and hope that the others absorb some information just by exposure. Someone once said “education is going from an unconscious to a conscious awareness of one’s ignorance.” Using that definition, learning definitely took place for me and I hope for my students as well.
