A Round Table Discussion for Those in Higher Education

Context

In just a few short years the web has increasingly become a 24/7 open marketplace for knowledge generation and exchange of ideas, dominated by new forms of social media and open access. While these changes have been hailed as potentially transformative influences on education, many questions remain about how higher education faculty members engage with these new practices and potentially disruptive technologies.

Consider the following framing questions for the session:

• What factors play the most significant role in faculty adoption of social media to support teaching and learning?

Getting faculty to carry this on their own rather than IT is sponsoring a workshop.
Money - small stipend is attractive

How does the stipend affect - it is a draw, an enticement

The focus on the instructional level rather on the technological level

• Does the use of social media to support personal learning seem to be a pre-cursor for more meaningful and effective pedagogical use?

• Do we need experience / reflection with the full buffet of social media tools in order to develop a "new media literacy?"
  

It's ok if someone comes to the table and/or walks away. This is a journey ... it may take time to reach comfort with some tools.

Other:

Was the use of social media driven by the technology?

Terry was looking for a more democratic classroom. Student voices engaged in constructing knowledge. Wiki created a more democratic classroom. She abandoned Blackboard and uses wikis in all of her classes.

There is no one path for using a technology. Opportunity for a technological encounter and then go away, test the tool and then return to critique the tool.

Links under resources may help answer this question


The faculty sometimes wants the IT administrator to tell them what to use. Trend if we find a variety of tools specific to a discipline seems to help faculty. Tools with low or no cost and little or no support is a factor in use.



Responses to these and other questions are part of a larger conversation about the impact of social media on long-held views of teaching and learning, and form the basis of this round table discussion.