[Air-L] Follow-up on "Successful Uses of Facebook in the Classroom"

[Michelle Everson]

First, I wanted to thank those of you who responded to my query about using
Facebook in the classroom. I have not been able to personally contact
everyone who responded to that message, but I definitely will do that in the
coming days.

Second, I wanted to follow up that initial post with another question.  I
find myself struggling quite a bit right now in terms of trying to structure
a particular assignment I would like my students to work on, and I was
hoping I could pick your brains a bit.  As I mentioned before, I teach
statistics (mostly at the graduate level), and one goal I have for students
in the class is that they become more statistically literate and they
develop the skills to critically analyze statistics they hear about or read
about in the news.  This summer, I came to class every day and brought in a
recent news story I had found that made use of statistics or presented
statistical information (sometimes in a misleading way), and we'd spend a
little time talking about that.  Statistics are all around us all the time,
and it was not hard to find things to bring to my students to talk about.  I
now want to give my students opportunities to share news stories they find
with me and each other, and I have some ideas, but I'm not sure of the best
way to go.

Initially, I was wondering if I could encourage students to tweet about news
articles they find that include statistics, or if I could set up a group in
Facebook where students would come to post links to articles and talk a bit
about these articles.  I envision an assignment where each student would
have to share a certain number of news stories AND show me that he or she
has taken the time to critically reflect on the news story and relate it to
something learned in class.  Because of this, Twitter might not be the best
option since we are limited in terms of characters, but I can see students
sharing a short link and then including a question of some kind or a comment
on the methodology used in the study (I actually did try using Twitter
awhile ago as an extra credit opportunity for students and it seemed to work
out okay).

Of course, I know not all students will have Facebook or Twitter accounts,
and even those who do may not be comfortable using those tools in an
educational context.  So, I was thinking maybe it would be better to set up
a class blog of some kind.  However, then I start thinking about the fact
that not all of my students are going to be technologically savvy, and using
a blog may be a frustrating experience for some of them, unless I can very
easily show them how to post things to the blog and insert hyperlinks and
videos if necessary.  What makes things a little bit more tricky is that
this fall, I am teaching two sections of this introductory statistics
course--one totally online and one in the classroom--and I would like to use
this assignment in both sections.  I can easily show my classroom students
how to blog, but I may not have the opportunity to meet all my online
students in person, so I need to figure out other ways to show them how to
blog.

A nice thing about a blog is that it's something everyone in class would be
able to contribute to, and therefore everyone in class will see all the
postings and be able to comment on each others' posts.  So, I'm leaning
toward this, but I wonder if anyone has experience trying to set up a class
blog and how that  has worked.  Do you have any words of wisdom to share?
Or, can you think of any other ideas that I might want to consider?

One last thing I am thinking about is setting up a "Statistics in the News"
assignment but giving students several choices about how they can complete
the assignment.  The could (a) contribute to a class blog I set up, (b) post
things in a Facebook group I set up, (c) tweet about statistics in the news,
or (d) come up with their own way to share, given the caveat that they think
of something that would incorporate technology in some way (e.g., maybe
create a YouTube video, or set up their own blog or website, etc.).  I like
this idea in that I would hope that each student could find something that
appeals to him or her (thus making this assignment something more
interesting and engaging).   On the flip side, it would be more work for me,
and I'm not sure I'm up to that.

Thanks again for your feedback!  It's great to have this group to bounce
ideas off of.

Sincerely,

Michelle Everson

-- 
Michelle Everson, Ph.D.
Quantitative Methods in Education
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Minnesota
gaddy001 at umn.edu
612-624-0691
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~delma001/CATALST/