Next semester I am going to host a Seminar which will try to make use of Blogs and Twitter. I’ll try to communicate a lot with the students using these tools. We will talk about pedagogical media theory and the way these tools could be used for learning.
Concept
My idea is that the students write short notes, exchange links and share ideas using the microblogging service. Reflections, media enhanced texts and structred ideas and findings should be collected within the blogs.
I would state that the mobile options and the factor that microblogging messages are cut down to 140 characters will make it easier and hopefully more fun to post also seminar related content. Later on the tweets could be used to make blogposts out of them, so there is some own material available before starting to write a blogpost.
I am not yet sure how, if and if yes where to aggregate all the content but are interested in suggestions. I made good experiences with keeping one blog as the aggregating central for all students blogs, but how about the tweets?
I would be happy if I can add a story about collaboration after the seminar, especially because I am sure that at least some of my seminar participants won’t meet in the seminar room because they’re from abroad.
The challange will be to connect the students and let them research/create the content of the seminar so that they can see wether these tools are a benefit for them or not. I would be happy if we could develop scenarios in which one or both of these tools might be meanimgful in educational contexts. But maybe the students don’t see a use for these tools in education, that would be ok too.
Additions
Inspired by a tweet of @trebors I decided to create the suhh group at tweetworks for this seminar.
I collectet some Links for the students concerning our topic at del.icio.us which is handed to them as a kind of preparation. If you’re interested in more of my links at delicious concerning twitter and blogging in educational contexts this is the right link for you.
Next steps
If there will be feedback from people who have worked with twitter in seminars already who can offer helpful hints they will influence my concept. Otherwise I will at least create/set up something to collect the blog entrys and prepare some tasks which will bring life into the students blogs and twitteraccounts, so that they will not only talk about blogging and microblogging in education but also “feel” those tools in the educational context.
Posting some feedback could be your next step 😉
Last time in my Seminar about blogging in education we talked about the question if one would like to use microblogging in education, what would be needed to be a good educational microblogging service.