As Mark said we’ve been tweeting through out the class using the #uwmcdm tag so now we have a collaborative class note document that you can see at: http://twemes.com/uwmcdm
Is this helpful? Has it been distracting? How did you all find the twittering in class?
-Adri
4 Comments
I liked it; I think it allowed us to have some interesting comments and side conversations. I was thinking earlier that it might be nice to have the 2nd projector tuned to the twemes page for a real-time cycle. After thinking about it more, though, it would probably distract the lecturer too much, encouraging tangents at the cost of foregoing the outline for class.
This is a nice, alternative record to the class. And surprisingly, I don’t mind students tweeting while I’m teaching. Of course I have the luxury of engaged, passionate MCDM’ers. Nancy may be right in wondering how distracting this might be for students who really don’t want to be there!
I’m going to explore the idea of a 2nd projector. I think we all need to learn to (a) multitask during multiple streams of communications; (b) understand that our message has to compete with all that noise. So although distraction is always a threat, it’s also a reality, and the key is to rise above it, or at the very least, turn it into a strength.
What’s perhaps most valuable about Twitter during class is that students can converse amongst themselves (relatively politely), and if the instructor can multitask and pay attention to the stream, it’s actually a non-intrusive way for everyone to participate non-verbally (and possibly more efficiently than raising a hand, waiting to be called upon).
Don’t take away the raising-hand and actual speaking interventions! Me like it human interactions too.
Anyway two more suggestions for our next class:
Perhaps we should consider a more descriptive tag like “uwdigital” browsing the tags it seems obvious to me that we could benefit from something more recognizable than “uwmcdm”.
Second, if anyone is taking random pictures of the class they can upload them to flicker and tag them with the same hashtag and they will show up in our twitter aggregate.
-Adri
I like the idea of a second projector for the tweme – it will help keep the tweets “on topic” for class and potentially lessen the noise. Folks who “don’t want to be there” don’t have to tweet or don’t have to hashtag (during everyone’s tweeting learning curve, we’d want to make sure the tag is used only for on-topic tweets anyway, or the tweme will become noisy).
The tweme will also help whenever someone is out of town and attending class virtually, as you can’t always hear that well on conf calls or have an opportunity to ask questions/participate in the discussion. Not that this happens a lot, but we are a digial media program, so virtual classes isn’t a huge stretch.
Documenting the class discussion in this way is also a nice (albeit informal) marketing tools for potential applicants. They can peruse the tweme and see what we’re talking about and the quality of discussion in class (another reason for ensuring the hashtag is used correctly/effectively). We also need to keep in mind that the tweme is public, as are all tweets unless you’ve changed your default settings.
I like the #uwdigital hashtag for all the reasons Adri mentions.
Aside: I still think we should experiment with one virtual class session in Second Life. Call it “research.”
~Carie