Panel Title: Innovating with Online Interfaces: Designing Learning Experiences that Help Students “Cloud” Up & “Tweet” On; Presenter #1 Title: “Clouds & Community: Helping Students Build Cumulative PLE’s (Personal Learning Environments) in Online Courses”; Presenter #2 Title: “What the Tweet!”: Key Tools and Strategies for Accessing and Verifying Legitimate and Immediate #Information Using the Twittersphere

Type of Presentation

Panel (1 hour and 15 minutes presentation total for two or more presenters)

Target Audience

Higher Education

Location

Room 211

Abstract

Presenter #1 Title: “Clouds & Community: Helping Students Build Cumulative PLE’s (Personal Learning Environments) in Online Courses”
Stacia D. Campbell, Texas Wesleyan University

This presentation will discuss strategies for building community in online courses, providing a pedagogical framework for scaffolding assignments that encourage students to embrace the concept of PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) while interacting in community interfaces (Cho & Cho, 2014). This presentation will help educators across the disciplines focus on designing learning experiences rather than projects/products. These layered experiences include videography, generative themes (Freire), student participation in assessment, research as an exploratory gathering, social media proposals, voiceovers, peer review using groups and blogs, and written self-reflection. While the examples in this presentation come from college-level composition courses (first-year writing, technical writing, and advanced composition) delivered online via the Blackboard course management system, audience members can customize these applications to their use and subject areas in helping students evaluate information critically.

Presenter #2 Title: “What the Tweet!”: Key Tools and Strategies for Accessing and Verifying Legitimate and Immediate #Information Using the Twittersphere
Carol J. Gerendas, Texas Wesleyan University

Twitter’s easy-to-use online/social interface, accompanied by “Twittermania” (Twitter-related tools), provides students with powerful methods for performing academic research and data/content analysis. Whether “asking,” “searching,” or “verifying,” Twitter offers students direct access to over 500 million subscribers and immediate connection to the most current information on any trending topic. Through Twitter, Hashtagify.me, @answerme and other resources, students can easily join and receive answers from communities of researchers, activists, and journalists interested in any social/global issue. While searching Twitter content, students might listen to or participate in ongoing conversations and gather evidence, facts, and commentary from those working directly in the field. Most importantly, Twitter’s immediacy requires students to think critically about their information sources as well as ethically about their use of public data—skills essential for today’s workplace. And, for both students and instructors, using Twitter for research de-centers the classroom and enriches the learning experience. It engages students in new ways of thinking about information, challenges them to join or create groups with similar interests, and provides them with a platform for responding to classroom lectures. Indeed, when instructors bring Twitter into the classroom, students find themselves interacting both physically and virtually with their classroom peers (and instructor), while at the same time, connecting to experts and information across the Twittersphere. So, if you're an instructor thinking about integrating Twitter in your classroom as a research tool--go ahead and try it--"What the Tweet!”

Presentation Description

This panel includes two presentations that focus on helping students use online interfaces such as twitter and clouds to develop critical literacies in research methods and in building PLE's (Personal Learning Environments) through scaffolded assignments. Examples come from speech and writing courses but can be customized across the disciplines in higher ed and in high school.

Keywords

online interfaces, Twitter, PLEs (Personal Learning Environments), Scaffolded learning, critical literacies, building community in online courses

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

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Oct 10th, 2:45 PM Oct 10th, 4:00 PM

Panel Title: Innovating with Online Interfaces: Designing Learning Experiences that Help Students “Cloud” Up & “Tweet” On; Presenter #1 Title: “Clouds & Community: Helping Students Build Cumulative PLE’s (Personal Learning Environments) in Online Courses”; Presenter #2 Title: “What the Tweet!”: Key Tools and Strategies for Accessing and Verifying Legitimate and Immediate #Information Using the Twittersphere

Room 211

Presenter #1 Title: “Clouds & Community: Helping Students Build Cumulative PLE’s (Personal Learning Environments) in Online Courses”
Stacia D. Campbell, Texas Wesleyan University

This presentation will discuss strategies for building community in online courses, providing a pedagogical framework for scaffolding assignments that encourage students to embrace the concept of PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) while interacting in community interfaces (Cho & Cho, 2014). This presentation will help educators across the disciplines focus on designing learning experiences rather than projects/products. These layered experiences include videography, generative themes (Freire), student participation in assessment, research as an exploratory gathering, social media proposals, voiceovers, peer review using groups and blogs, and written self-reflection. While the examples in this presentation come from college-level composition courses (first-year writing, technical writing, and advanced composition) delivered online via the Blackboard course management system, audience members can customize these applications to their use and subject areas in helping students evaluate information critically.

Presenter #2 Title: “What the Tweet!”: Key Tools and Strategies for Accessing and Verifying Legitimate and Immediate #Information Using the Twittersphere
Carol J. Gerendas, Texas Wesleyan University

Twitter’s easy-to-use online/social interface, accompanied by “Twittermania” (Twitter-related tools), provides students with powerful methods for performing academic research and data/content analysis. Whether “asking,” “searching,” or “verifying,” Twitter offers students direct access to over 500 million subscribers and immediate connection to the most current information on any trending topic. Through Twitter, Hashtagify.me, @answerme and other resources, students can easily join and receive answers from communities of researchers, activists, and journalists interested in any social/global issue. While searching Twitter content, students might listen to or participate in ongoing conversations and gather evidence, facts, and commentary from those working directly in the field. Most importantly, Twitter’s immediacy requires students to think critically about their information sources as well as ethically about their use of public data—skills essential for today’s workplace. And, for both students and instructors, using Twitter for research de-centers the classroom and enriches the learning experience. It engages students in new ways of thinking about information, challenges them to join or create groups with similar interests, and provides them with a platform for responding to classroom lectures. Indeed, when instructors bring Twitter into the classroom, students find themselves interacting both physically and virtually with their classroom peers (and instructor), while at the same time, connecting to experts and information across the Twittersphere. So, if you're an instructor thinking about integrating Twitter in your classroom as a research tool--go ahead and try it--"What the Tweet!”