Teachers in the networked world face many new challenges. As Temple University’s Barry Vacker puts it, instructors may find themselves “competing with the entire Internet” as students multitask during class with laptops and cell phones. But what if instructors could actually use the very tools that seem to be deteriorating students’ attention to increase student…
Tag: Twitter
Creating a Writing Network through Twitter
In his TeachOIT post “Twitter: What’s the Point?“, Tony explained a few ways Twitter has been useful to him both socially and professionally. I’d like to add a further way that Twitter has improved my academic life. As a graduate student, finding the motivation to do academic writing can be…elusive at times. Many doctoral candidates…
Twitter: What’s the Point?
During last week’s “Overview of Emerging Technology” a good portion of the audience indicated an interest in hearing about Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that is receiving lots of press coverage. The general question people asked is “what’s the point?” I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a year so I demoed how Twitter looks and mumbled…
Faculty Spotlight: Facebook for Instruction
For our first Emerging Technology & Pie event of the semester Steve Fox, lecturer in the Journalism Department, joined us to present on his use of Facebook and Twitter in undergraduate Journalism courses. We had a good number of new faces showed up, and a wide range of ages and departments were represented in the…
Journalism Students use Twitter to Cover Debate
The Amherst Wire has an article discussing the use of micro-blogging tool Twitter by UMass Journalism students to cover the presidential debate. UMass journalism professors Steve Fox, Scott Brodeur and BJ Roche asked their students to contribute to a “#umassprez2” topic that would group all of their posts together. Posts were automatically grouped on an…
“Ambient Awareness” in Social Networks?
Clive Thompson has an interesting piece in the last New York Times Magazine that explores the concept of “ambient awareness” as manifested in social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I find this concept of ambient awareness fascinating, and the article presents an interesting perspective on the potential effects, and even possible value, of using…
Web 2.0 Wednesday #6: Twitter
As we move into the last few weeks of the semester our Wednesday Web 2.0 posts will be looking at some of the more “emerging” Web 2.0 services. This means we’ll be looking as some tools that are probably not as well established as things like wikis and blogs, but you’ll get a chance to…