My plan was pretty simple: watch the first episode of "How I Met Your Mother" and live tweet about the experience. Beforehand, we talked about Twitter and some were already familiar with Twitter. After getting the students to watch the episode, none of the 8 students even made a single tweet. It was pretty frustrating. I expected this to a fun activity where students could engage in English. It ended up not working out that way at all!
In retrospect, the discussion in Dr. Dennen's slideshow about student resistance was telling. For the students who already used Twitter (predominantly in Korean), they had little interest in having a lesson encroach upon their personal space. For the students who didn't use Twitter, they were hesitant to do it to begin with. In Korea, Twitter has to be verified through your phone number and many students had phones through their parent, thus making even the initial signup for Twitter very difficult.
So how did I resolve the situation? It is worth noting that this was in an optional program, but students evaluations were important. I ended up scrapping the Twitter aspect and just focused on Instagram instead. Trying to make people interested in Twitter who are opposed to it is difficult!
It seems as if your students were much more resistant to Twitter than to Instagram. You explained their antagonism toward Twitter well, but why were they so open to other forms of social media?
ReplyDeleteHi Bruce, I can understand the resistance of using social media in the learning space, myself being one of them. But this course has slowly opened up my mind and perspective to see the potential of social media to support learning, but it takes time I guess. I think people generally are open to all forms of social media, but not specifically the use of social media for formal learning. My personal experience and perspective is that I view formal learning as a professional endeavor, hence it has no business to cross the line into my social media space, which is kind of like a private sanctuary for me to connect with friends and family for all things other then work-related, etc. It is therefore rather difficult for me to blur this line and make social media work for both purposes, but I think with time and the correct structure in place, it can drive the behaviors necessary for social media to support learning.
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