Social Media and the Classroom

From Professor Kahlil Marrar and Assistant Professor Eric Landahl at DePaul University, this video is a great introduction, from the academic point of view, on why social media can or should be used in the classroom, but also how:

“I think that our role is to sort of guide students towards seeing social networking sites as not simply this implement they can use in order to discuss ideas that do not relate to their education. Rather it could be tools they can use for their education: to advance their education, to collaborate on projects, to talk about homework assignments, to perhaps engage in peer review of one anothers works.”

“The nice thing about social networking is it allows you a sort of  an early warning about problems, and it also allows you a continuous process that shows what students are learning. ”

“What we suffer from today is the explosion of social networking, the explosion of communication, and the danger with those kinds of  explosions is that we don’t know where to turn to, they have no rhyme or reason, there’s no one way to utilise them. In which case it’s up to each professor to basically understand the role in the social networking world, but also understand exactly how you want to use social networking. And this clearly begins with defining an outcome.”

YouTube: Social Media and the Classroom