I already think of myself as an open scholar
and then social media is a way to communicate that.
Well, scholarly practice is a word that's usually tied to research and publications
so, that doesn't have to be all that it is though.
You can also do scholarly practice in more informal ways.
So you can do it through blogs, you can do it through social media posts,
you can do it through conversations that you have on social media.
In Arts One, students have their own blogs
It's a year-long course, so they use the blog for the whole year
and they are meant to be having discussions, reflections on the books that we're reading on the blogs.
All of the classes in this team taught course
their blogs get syndicated into a big site for all of Arts One.
So that way the students are able to not only read each others blogs from within their small class,
but also the blogs of students within the rest of the Arts One course.
Students will learn a lot, not just from what they hear from other people,
but from what they tell to other people.
One of the things I love about blog posts is that
it's this medium that depending on how you assign it
can open students up to this sort of feeling comfortable about really saying what they think about a particular text
where it feels almost more intimate
and I find that they get such interesting ideas that way.
that they might not otherwise get if they were forcing it into an essay format.
Recognition of how people might approach the same thing differently
I think is a crucial life skill
just thinking about how not being in your bubble and believing that
because it seems this way to you, that that just is how it is right?
I think that's a really eye-opening and important thing to do and an important lesson to learn.
So when we do get negative comments on our YouTube videos
for this class that I teach
I do try to act as an educator
It can be an opportunity for acting as an educator in a wider sphere than just your class.
A lot of what students and the rest of us are doing online in social media
is interacting with people we don't know.
How do we figure out the best ways to have those respectful conversations
and learn from each other without turning each other off
is very hard to do sometimes in the digital medium
and I think we can start practicing those things.
What I am most interested in and what I see in other people as well
is student participation in open education.
So, students actually, not just professors creating educational resources that then they share
but also student work becoming something that is adding
as David Wiley puts it, adding value to the world.
There's so much work out there that can be used and reused.
How do you find out about it?
Social media is critical in open education.
It is one of the many ways that we communicate
and it's one of the ways we communicate across many boundaries, certainly not all
because you have to be on the internet, you have to be on social media
but it's wider than you might otherwise get.
