I wrote the basics for this post ages ago in late June when we held out #Medialit11 course at Durham. The problem was that I then ran straight into Methodist Conference without any time to actually sit down and update what I wanted to do.
That has meant that we have had some time to look at the feedback from #Medialit11, which was pretty good. On the whole, people seem to have really enjoyed the course, thought that it was value for money, and learned so much. I was delighted to see the number of students who were then able to put everything into practice so well in some practical placement opportunities which were offered over the week following the course.
So, Pete Brazier (@pbrazier) and Rick Ormrod (@rickormrod) were at the Methodist Conference enjoying everything on offer there and making a huge impact on the much discussed social media impact of #methconf. Indeed, I heard the delight from both side - from the students saying how marvellous it was to see theory put into practice, and from the Methodist Media team saying how wonderful the student were...lots of mutual appreciation.
I've seen other emails from a couple of people who had a placement at Premier Media in London - yet more great conversations and practical earthing of the course.
Placements, then, are important within social media exploration. It's all well and good to learn the theory but if you have nowhere to put it into practice it is useless. A sunflower seed needs to be buried in the soil before it can grow. But you knew that already! So, the question now would be how much of our other programmes do we need to embed in practice?
As well as placements, lots of tech stuff was used within the course I thought I would just highlight some uses of technology within the course teaching structure we used or experimented with or would like to experiment with:
Twitter #hashtag, Twapperkeeper and Twitterfall
Twitter #hashtags are a great resource. If you read my blog, you'll know of the power of #methconf. We managed to make use of a hashtag to bring about a new level of engagement with the Conference. A hashtag gathers different people together and can mean you can read Twitter's public stream through the lens of that particular hashtag - just search for it. It filters everything else out and so you can have focussed conversations. There are other ways you can use that too - such as through twitter dispays programs like Twitterfall.
Twapperkeeper is a simple web-based site which can archive all the tweets which have mentioned the hashtag. This creates an invaluable hashtag archive which can be searched by participants later or by those studying the event in some way.
There are lots of ways to display tweets during the event...our favourite is Twitterfall.
We have used a twitterfall in a number of conferences now. Basically, you set up a screen at the front and a display for the teacher/lecturer showing the same data. You set up the fall to search for all tweets on the web using the relevant hashtag (#medialit11) and those tweets gradually fall down the page as people tweet. You can limit the tweets by location and you can exclude tweets on various criteria. So it is pretty much controllable. The power of the twitterfall is in the back channel that it provides for the teaching experience.
Internally, the fall offers students opportunity to ask questions of other students and therefore decenter learning. No longer is the person up front the only person offering insights and information. Moreover, while the person up front gets on with their inspirational presentation, others can then provide either enhancement material or clarification material. For example, in #medialit11, a number of people made use of funny video clips - these were almost immediately linked to their YouTube source by people in the room. Students could check them, store them, reuse them. The presenter didn't need to footnote every link. Moreover, students could crowd source other clips or resources which were important and took the point the presenter was making even further.
Externally, the fall offers an insight into the flow of what was happening at #medialit11. A number of people pitched in with ideas (including @johnnybaker, @kesterbrewin, @maggidawn, @revpamsmith, @fragranceofgod, @... - go see the archive!). These people offered an external perspective. They pitched in further ideas or insights from their own work which enriched what was happening within the room. They also provided points for clarification by asking what was going on, what was happening, what did that mean. Occasionally, we were able to interact with those questions.
Most speakers tend to find the twitterfall a distraction. A number of people will use the twitterfall back channel for heckling a speaker or making fun of what is going on. If you say something which is slightly ambiguous it will be picked up by some smart alec and appear on the screen. This makes people laugh and the speaker has no idea what is going on. That's why we put the display on the speaker's table. It meant that they have access to what is going on and a quick scan can mean you can engage with what someone is saying and make the whole thing much more interactive. But this is a difficult skill to master - keeping your own lecture going and following a sometimes chaotic back channel conversation will stretch even the best communicators.
Using twitter and the twitterfall and promoting their use in a classroom environment is not without problems...
Other tech we made use of:
Presentation tools - Keynote and Powerpoint are fine and do all they can and all they cannot. A couple of us are increasingly using Prezi. You can see some examples of my Prezi's for the event here.
Media: Youtube is amazingly rich for downlable or linkable clips for illustrating a point...
Audioboo: a website for short simple sound recordings - examples of mine here
That's all I've got time for at the moment...
Pete
http://pmphillips.posterous.com/technology-and-teaching-medialit11
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