Tracking Social Media Footprints in the Online Class

Twitter has taken over the classroom…and you’re to blame! Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration. However we cannot escape the reality that we are in a social media era, even in the ivory towers of academia. And, as those who shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders, we need to embrace the technology revolution.

What This Article Is and Is Not About

First, some parameters about this article: This is not a tutorial on Twitter. Michael Hyatt is the best writer around on how to set up and use Twitter effectively. If you are not on Twitter, then I would highly advise you read Hyatt’s beginner’s guide before going any further.

Additionally, my goal here is not to debate whether social media is simply technology to be manipulated or relationships to be developed. While this is certainly an important conversation to have, I will, in this vein, refer you to The Plugged-In Professor edited by Sharmila Ferris and Hilary Wilder or Reynol Junco’s Engaging Students through Social Media. This article is about how to effectively use Twitter as a method of tracking attendance in the online classroom.

To begin this conversation, each of us needs to assess our familiarity and expertise level with social media. This, of course, raises a number of debates, primarily over whether there is such a thing as a “digital native,” “digital immigrant” or “digital alien.” For now, I’m going to refer you to an article that I published last year at WorkingPreacher.org so that we can soldier on with our discussion. I would, however, encourage you to discern where you are with your understanding and application of social media.

Not Sticking To What I Know

Now, you may be wondering where my interest in social media, especially for using it in education came from. I’ve been involved with social media for several years, switching over to Twitter almost exclusively in 2012. In terms of using social media in the classroom, well, my teaching colleague introduced the idea to me in his traditional in-seat courses. He gives participation points for tweeting about his youth ministry courses.

While I was intrigued by this, I wanted to see if this could be applied to the online classroom. For all their pomp and circumstance, online classes are actually quite mundane in terms of what you can and can’t do in them. The discussion forum has become the tried-and-true method of interaction and assessment of student learning. Discussion forums, however, can run the gamut of a single objective-based question that seeks to only assess content-learning to layered conversations based on multiple questions that require engaged dialogue throughout the modular week in order to assess comprehension.

I actually like using discussion forums, and use them exclusively in my practical ministry courses. Yet, I was finding their use difficult to justify in both high-content biblical studies courses and online independent studies. Thus, I experimented with using Twitter in some different courses to see if I could develop a better way of engaging and interacting with students.

Making Social Media Work for Your Classes

Social media posts, especially tweets, fall into one of three categories: thick, thin and throwaway.

• Thick tweets are designed to engage in conversation and are usually comprised of an external link and an open-ended question, critique or reflective statement. The “retweet” function on Twitter and the “share” function on Facebook are also ways of engaging this way.
• Thin tweets are designed to share something with the larger social media audience, like an article or quote. While “being generous” is Michael Hyatt’s cardinal social media virtue, these cannot be classified as “thick” because they are more about sharing rather than engaging.
• Throwaway tweets are designed to update your followers on your day (“status updates”). This is essentially how sites like Facebook and Yik-Yak operate. They are not necessarily bad, however they do little to contribute to the social media community other than to remind each other of our presence.

Now, with all of this on the table, here’s how this (sort of) works. First, establish a hashtag (#) based on your course ID number to track attendance (i.e., #CMY453 for my seminar on small group ministry or #BTH 202 for my spiritual formation course). [Hashtags, while quintessential to Twitter and Instagram, can be used on Facebook.] Require that this be used in every post related to the course or it cannot count towards attendance.

Second, set limits on how many times students should post a week and what types of posts will be accepted for “attendance.” For me, I require a minimum of three posts per week, and I require that at least three of those posts be either “thick” or “thin” posts. In one online preaching course, the students would frequently share sermon videos from popular preachers or articles from online journals like Relevant and Leadership with me. In an online spiritual formation course, several students took pictures of highlighted pages of the textbook and posted them on Instagram.

Third, require students to “tag” you directly in at least one post a week. For example, one of my small group seminar students tagged me in a Vine post of a homeless man barking at another man and asked “What should I do if this happens in my group?” It was certainly funny, yet it also demonstrated learning in that this student realized how unprepared most group leaders feel.

Concerns

Finally, there are some drawbacks to using social media that should be pointed out. First, you cannot always clearly aggregate search results on Twitter, and it is even harder on Facebook and Instagram. Second, you have to be friends with students on Facebook, which can be problematic for faculty. Third, there is the question of whether engaging students on external social media sites can satisfy engagement criteria for online accreditation. This last one is, I think, really an important conversation that we need to have regarding the future of education.

Photo Credit: “Lyme Regis – June 2006 – The Wall – The Eyes Have It!” by Gareth Williams— CC by 2.0

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