What’s in your lunchbox?

I attended two conferences in the past few days: the Emerging Learning Design (ELD) conference at Montclair University and The RealTime Report (#RLTM) in New York.  The audience at ELD was primarily educators at the college and high school level.  The latter event was all about business, and I’ll be blogging about both this week.

First up, ELD.

Bringing little experience in social media with them, attendees at ELD asked the types of questions business people asked in 2008.  Many needed to learn the basics of Twitter and Facebook: whats a DM, how do I set up a Facebook page with students and still respect privacy, etc.  The concerns unique to education were rarely voiced.  When issues like the  amount of time teenagers spend on Facebook were raised, those asking the questions had difficulty opening their minds to the idea that the platform may be new, but the need to socialize with peers has been around as long as we’ve had teenagers!

I knew I was in trouble when the first keynote speaker opened with the question, “How many of you don’t know why anyone would want to use Twitter? Who cares what you had for lunch!”  This brought to mind a variation on the Ralph Nader quote about politics: “If you’re not turned on to social media, social media will turn on you.”  To give them credit, every educator there realized they were late to the party, knew Nader was right, and wanted reach students in the 21^st century via social media.

Probably 25% of the attendees actively use the major social networks, and I even got one LinkedIn invitation while I was there.  Signficantly less than the networking done at #RTLM, a few educators scribbled email addresses rather than hand each other a business card or send that LinkedIn invite.  Perhaps along with the basics of social media, educators need to realize the value of networking.

That first keynote presentation by @intellagirl (another member of the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Stripe”) about how to integrate and assess whether a social media tool is an appropriate addition to curriculum was the highlight of the day.  By addressing the strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of a platform, educators take into account not just what this new technology can do, but how users interact, what conceptions students carry with them when they enter the classroom, and what purpose each social media platform serves for the vast number of people that use it.

For example, Twitter’s strategic advantage is the massive user-to-user communication that takes place in its online space as well as the ability promote and manage a brand or idea and hopefully generate income.  Tactically, Twitter allows users to send short multi-use messages within a flexible network.  The constraint of 140 characters ensures the brevity and timliness of tweets.  The operational aspects include hashtags, DMs, RTs, and all the many conventions we use on Twitter.

How teachers integrate Twitter and how students react may or may not work the first time – @intelligirl shared a wonderful story about using Facebook with graduate students that initially failed because of the students’ concerns with privacy. However, using this approach does help determine whether Twitter is useful in a specific curriculum, how it might achieve specific educational goals, and how instructional/user-created content will mesh student/user-created content.

As one of the few educator attendees personally and professionally immersed in social media, I became less of a participant and more a supplier of examples from both my employment as a teacher and my freelance experiences.  @andimulsh‘s use of the #upperclassy hashtag for her Advanced Journalism students became the hit of the workshop that dealt with integrating social media into the classroom.  My experience with @cooperhewitt when I organized a field trip to their Design exhibit last fall prompted  discussion in a social media in the arts workshop.

By now, my readers probably think I didn’t enjoy this conference or learn anything I’ll take back to my classroom.  So wrong! In addition to the first presentation, @lthumann‘s direct approach to Twitter in the classroom should be useful to any educator who hopes to incorporate that platform into his or her lessons:

Twitter can be used to

1. build apersonal brand (great for high school students with portfolios)
2. learn to be concise (remember 140 characters?)
3. personify characters on Twitter (great creative writing exercise)
4. collaborate on same topic with different cultures (Millenial penpals)
5. bring experts into the classroom virtually (the first thing I did with Twitter and @chrisconn)

For beginners and seasoned Twitter users, these suggestions can be attempted in any classroom for any age group of students, including adults!

After lunch where I learned Montclair thinks everyone eats meat, tweeted about it, and learned I wasn’t the only disappointed veggie attendee, Craig Kapp’s presentation on Artifical Reality really intrigued the geek in me.  Technically sophisticated, I did enjoy his examples of how AR is available for use today and will certainly try a number of websites and programs he explored with my Advanced Java class.  You can check him out at his blog  – well worth a visit if only to see what’s happening in the world of AR.

ELD12 is scheduled for June 1, 2012.  I look forward to attending once again to see how far educators go with social media in their classrooms over the next year.  I bet every teacher who attends ELD12 will know that Twitter is so much more than what we’ve had for lunch today.