We’re usually fairly good at talking about things that have gone well, less prone to mentioning (especially in public) when things do not go as planned. Yet we can learn from our mistakes, and the mistakes of others, so this is probably something we should do more of.
So let me tell you a story …
Graeme Pate is a star. He’s always engaged in his teaching, reflecting on his practice and trying new things. Last year we asked him to come along to the Learning and Teaching Centre and give us a presentation about using Twitter in the classroom. He did, it was great and engaging and we all wondered where he got all of his energy from and how he could multi-task so well. (Link to his slides here.) Using Social Media (Tweeting) to engage students in lectures from UofGlasgowLTU
Steve Draper from Psychology was impressed enough to contact me afterwards and say that he’d like to try tweeting in the classroom with his students. Now, if you know Steve you’ll know that he is also always keen to try out teaching techniques that others have used successfully. You’ll probably also know that he does not do social media. I do, though, so I agreed to support him if he wanted to give it a go. The model we opted for was one where Steve would lecture to the class while I ran the “back channel” by monitoring tweets. I used my own laptop and connected it up to one of the screens in the lecture theatre so that we could have a Tweetwall on one screen and Steve’s powerpoint slides on the other.
He chose a SH course of 27 students. The plan was that Steve would email them the week before and ask them to set up Twitter accounts prior to the first lecture, but that didn’t happen. I did set up a new account for me to use so that my regular followers did not see what I was doing. However, he had asked them to bring web enabled devices and most of them did – so we asked students to set up Twitter accounts if they did not have them. Hmmm, Twitter did not like a lot of requests from the same IP address, so most students could not do that. Lesson learnt 😉 However, some managed, and others already had an account, so we carried on.
The way Steve usually teaches is to lecture for a while then stop and ask a question.Students must first think about it on their own for a minute, then talk in pairs, then Steve would go round the class and ask for responses. Ideal – that fitted perfectly. So Steve and I decided that Steve would lecture for a while, then ask a question and students would think alone, discuss in pairs and then tweet the answer to it. Steve could then look at the screen and see the responses. Students agreed to try this and off we went.
So Steve lectured, and asked a question, and students thought and discussed and tweeted. And Steve stood with his back to the Tweetwall and asked them questions. Hmmm. I pointed him to the tweeted answers and that sort of worked.
Anyway – long story short – Steve never really engaged with the Tweetwall. It looked good on paper but for some reason it did not work in the classroom. I’m still pondering why it didn’t. I changed tack and started looking up some of the things he said and tweeting links to them, which both he and the students appreciated. Some of them joined in as well. (Steve particularly liked me finding this one, which he had referred to in his lecture.)
So was this a failure? Well, yes if you focus on the original design – we did not do what we set out to achieve. But we did get at least some students using Twitter (there were about 135 tweets over the 5 lectures), and we did create a resource of links to add to the lecture slides (each week I sent a spreadsheet of tweets to Steve which he added to Moodle).
What would you have done differently?
Image credit: Nuremberg Funnel – ad stamp 1910″ by Unknown – Website: http://gv-eningen.blogspot.com/2011/02/nurnberger-trichter-werbevignette-von.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuremberg_Funnel_-_ad_stamp_1910.jpg#/media/File:Nuremberg_Funnel_-_ad_stamp_1910.jpg