Using Twitter to Transform the Classroom!

"Whereas people might spend a long time composing a comment to a blog post or engage in lengthy, in - depth conversation on a discussion board, Twitter invites more in - the - moment interactions. It provides an easy way to maintain connections, share thoughts, or ask for advice." - Jane Bozarth

BLOG BOOK TOUR

While I was on holiday with my family in Sabah, I got a wonderful surprise tweet message (above) from a famous author called Jane Bozarth. Interestingly, I was picture-tweeting my holiday during that period using TwitPic (on my IPhone). So, perhaps my interesting family or baby photos sparked her to invite me to be part of the blog book tour for her new book entitled 'Social Media for Trainers'. Or perhaps it was Karl Kapp who recommended me, as I was also part of his Blog Book Tour earlier this year with this post: Learning in 3D! Why? How?

Whatever sparked her to invite me; I surely didn't need any spark to accept the invitation :)

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TRAINERS

If you already don't know, Jane Bozarth is the author of several relevant and useful e-Learning related books. I have previously explored E-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring and Better than Bullet Points, and you can actually find them in our University library (IMU), too. In short, I was already familiar with her great work before exploring her latest master piece.

Her latest book, 'Social Media for Trainers' basically explores in depth the essential social media tools to facilitate sizzling (online) learning environments and experiences, using learning tools such as Twitter, blogs, wikis, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, SlideShare, Flickr, etc.

What makes her latest book so special (to me) is that it uses a non-jargonized conversational language style, meaning even my mum could understand and enjoy it. The book is not obsessed with showing us where to click, but instead explores how we can use these learning (or social media) tools to enhance and transform our personal and social learning environments. Not only do you get the 'WHY' and 'WHY NOT', you also get tons of excellent stories and tips on how to get started and sizzle your way to sizzling e-learning. Although, the book uses the word 'Trainers' in its title, this book is also a perfect read for anyone involved in education (Period!).

To find out more about Jane Bozarth's latest book, visit the Social Media for Trainers Facebook page and/or follow Twitter on @SoMe4Trainers.

Having said that, social media has its dark sides, too. But, like most things on planet earth; we can use it to transform, or destroy life. It is really up to us to make that choice (unless we are 'Under 13'). Right?

For this post, I am only going to focus on Twitter (Chapter 2), and explore how we can use it to transform our classroom or face-to-face learning. Sometimes you need to infuse learning tools into the classroom for stubborn educators to really see the variety of amazing possibilities such tools could bring to our learning and thinking.

Are you ready?

TWITTER

Actually, I should first thank Patricia Donaghy for inspiring me to take up Twitter as a learning tool. THANK YOU! Although, she didn't introduce me to Twitter, she did provide the initial spark needed for me to take this learning tool seriously. I mean seriously, who cares reading tweets where persons are pondering upon whether they should go to the toilet or not, or reading millions of tweets cursing Tiger Woods. Why should I bother reading what people are thinking now, such as reading Paris Hilton's struggle to patent 'That's hot!' It is ridiculous, and for sure a waste of time.

TRUE, using Twitter could be a waste of time, but it could also be used to connect and interact with educators and learners from all over the world. Imagine filtering 90 million daily tweets from 145+ million registered users down to who is talking about 'e-learning', or your specific research area. What a wonderful learning stream that would be. And did you know that 25% of the 90 million daily tweets contain links. Meaning people are not only talking crap, but also sharing juicy links, including articles and papers that sometimes even Google can't spot for you.

If you are interested to know dozens or even hundreds of ways to use Twitter to learn, teach and interact, these 55 great twitter articles should be a good starting point (I mean starting points!). Besides that, you might want explore my first three (3) journeys to explore Twitter for learning. Here we go:

• Using Twitter to Amplify Connective Learning and Sharing at ICEL 2010
  
  
  
  
• Join the #moodlewish Twitter Stream!
  
  
  
  
  
  
• iTunes U Services For ALL! Join the #itunesuwish... (Failed project, but fun!)
  
  
  
  

Fine, but how can we use Twitter to spice up classroom learning?

Let's focus on that now...



TWITTER FOR LEARNING

First, you need to make sure that all your students are using, or have a Twitter account. Most students should have little difficulty (especially X, Y and Z generations) with signing up for Twitter by themselves. To avoid any hassles, I would recommend that you specify in your course plan/guide that you will be using Twitter as one of the learning tools for the course.

As Twitter is a perfect communication tool for mobile devices (e.g. IPhones, Blackberries, Androids, IPads, smart phones, and notebooks), you only need to ensure a decent Wi-Fi enabled environment, and most, if not all students can participate during a face-to-face learning session. If not, let's imagine and be a bit futuristic, because in 2-3 years time, I believe most students will have some form of Wi-Fi enabled mobile device (Well, at least at Universities in Malaysia). No rocket science required to come that prediction.

Secondly, you need to establish a unique hashtag (#) for your course, which will make it easier for your students (and you) to follow and participate in the course conversation. If it becomes really active, it will evolve into one enriching and inspiring learning stream (e.g. #plenk2010). However, some students might prefer getting daily updates in the form of a sizzling self-organized online newspaper. paper.li could do that without you basically doing anything, except for signing up and feeding it your hashtag (e.g. PLENK2010). Awesome!

To promote the usage of Twitter and your unique course hashtag (e.g. #plenk2010), you might also want to create a video tutorial (e.g. using Screenr). Here is an example, where I promoted the usage of Twitter during the ICEL 2010 conference using the '#icel5' hashtag:

Besides starting and facilitating a Twitter learning stream, you will probably want to capture and archive the evolving learning conversation, which could sadly get lost over time (Done that, been there!). For that, you could for example use Twapper Keeper.

If you are too busy or quite IT illiterate, and still want to use Twitter for your course, ask someone from your University/College's e-learning (or educational technology) team to conduct a Twitter session with the students. If they are not capable of that (or lazy), they should (all) be fired on the spot! Learning has evolved since the Courseware development era!!!!

Here are a few tips on facilitating the use of Twitter for classroom learning:

• BEFORE CLASS
  
  Before every Face-to-face learning session you might want to encourage students to ask questions regarding the upcoming topic/module/lesson, or perhaps what kind of expectations they have, or even what they really want to learn, and suggest things to discuss. By doing so, you might get a clearer view of what really matters to students, and as a result your learning session might evolve into a sizzling learning experience. If students prefer sharing and discussing in private, you could use GroupTweet instead of a hashtag (which can be viewed by public). GroupTweet helps groups communicate privately via Twitter.
  
  
  
• DURING CLASS
  
  Twitter is an excellent venue for students to ask the lecturer questions during the learning session, especially if you are in a large lecture hall (200+ students), and the student is a bit shy. To keep track of the flow of questions visually (for everyone to see), you could use Monitter or Hootcourse (or even TweetDeck), which will update as soon as the tweet (question) has been posted.
  

  Hootcourse's Classroom Mode feature allows course tweets to show up in real-time on a projected screen.
  

  
  Besides using Twitter for questions, you could even conduct polls (use Twtpoll, Poll Everywhere, or SAP Web 2.0) during the class, and the results can even be displayed live in your PowerPoint presentation (or the web. Yes, even in Keynote, too!). Lecturer's love to ask students, "Do you understand? Is it clear?", and everyone says 'Yes' loudly (or silently with a nod). And the lecturer feels comforted with his masterful lecture. Sadly, the truth might indicate otherwise, and by using a poll, we could more easily gauge whether students understand or not, with some real stats to refer to. We could basically test them directly in class on something, and then if for example the majority is clueless of the right answer, we could revisit that component, and explore simpler ways to explain and inspire them to learn it. Now that is cool for learning!
  
  

• AFTER CLASS
  
  We could ask them to tweet questions after class regarding what they have learned, or related things they would like to be clarified. Also, we should encourage students to answer other students questions, and by providing some incentive for the most active students (e.g. bonus marks, praise, or perhaps a Mars bar), should not be so hard to do. Also, you might want to ask students to provide short comments on how the learning session was, and how it can be improved further. If your ego is receptive to constructive (and destructive) feedback, you are going to win the next 'Best Lecturer Award', trust me! Anyway, we lecturers are noble people, and the reward of experiencing students' learn, or getting those 'AHA' moments are awesome rewards in themselves that even money can't buy (Well, it depends!).
  

These are just a few possibilities for using Twitter to enhance your face-to-face learning sessions, and of course sizzle it beyond the classroom. I hope you realize by now why Twitter is the number one ranked learning tool among learning professionals around the world (Facebook is number 10!).

Besides the Twitter apps mentioned above, click here for a comprehensive list of other learning possibilities.

THINKING BEYOND

However, Twitter alone is not going to transform the students' learning experience. If you ask me, we should also encourage students to continuously reflect (deep thinking) their learning in their own personal blog(s) (using Blogger or Wordpress).

They should work on course projects using wikis (or collaborative learning tools), such as Google Docs, Google Sites, Wikispaces or Wetpaint. They could use Facebook to set-up and establish learning/interest groups, and promote causes they strongly believe in.

All students (and lecturers' of course!) should know, or learn how to use RSS readers (e.g. Google Reader) to enable them to efficiently access relevant information (updates come to you, instead of you needing to visit the actual sites) about what is going on in the world, especially in their learning domains.

Besides these essential learning tools, there are many more possibilities to interact with and filter our learning world to be more efficient, effective, interactive and inspiring.

Let's explore how we can use Social Media to transform the way we connect, learn, interact, share and facilitate. Today, we have amazing learning possibilities, we just need to (I would say 'MUST') find time to explore them :)

Top 10 Learning Sites for ________? Yours? #T10LS :)

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."

- Albert Einstein

"See, here's the thing, though. I don't want 99 mind mapping resources, tools, and tips. I want one. That works. Really well. "
- Stephen Downes

CLUELESS?

To cut the crap short, and get to the point... It is amazing how many educators (that I have crossed path with) until today (Yes, already 2010!), who are clueless or know little about the amazing world of Open Educational Resources (OER)/Open Courseware (OCW) and learning tools. There are probably many reasons for that, so I am not going to go into that.

But, what I find even more shocking and troubling is educators who are also clueless about the amazing learning possibilities (tools and resources) within their own field/area/specialization/learning domain. I just hope you are not one of them.

No doubt we can't know and do everything, and there will always be new tools and resources blazing through in an ever growing global learning sharing stream. But, we should have some idea, or be open to explore new and innovative learning possibilities within our learning domain(s), because our students deserve it (or they will eventually desert us...).



WHAT TO DO?
So, how can we motivate or inspire educators to find and explore these new learning possibilities?

Peer pressure? Peer recommendation? Now, we are getting closer (I think!). Of course mambo jumbo lists are useful (e.g. OER), but for a busy educator it might be.... No time for that! Stephen Downes's quote above makes sense!

But, what if we filtered out the juiciest learning resources and tools, and stamped our validation for use (or recommendation). Now, that would be interesting, wouldn't it? Instead of 1000, 100, it is narrowed down to digestible portions (unless you are Takeru Kobayashi!).

To set a digestible portion criteria, we could use the magical number of seven, but I am going to suggest no more than 10 for whatever... Anyway, we don't have to be too rigid on such things, but just be reminded that Less is often more (especially for learning). Look who's talking :)

For example, I am looking for excellent resources or tools to explore critical thinking, where to start? I know Stephen Downes is facilitating a Critical Literacies Online Course, and has published a widely used 'Guide to the Logical Fallacies'. So, wouldn't it be great to have a juicy Top 10 (or anything less, or perhaps a bit more!) list of excellent critical thinking resources recommended by Stephen Downes as a starting point.

Of course, there are many more sites to explore, but having a great starting point validated or recommended by an expert won't harm anyone (would it?).

So, let's think bigger! What if more experts shared their filtered and recommended learning resource lists for their particular specializations or areas. Imagine great contextualized learning start points for Psychology, Medicine, Biology, Law, English, Creative thinking, critical thinking...(perhaps a bit more micro) you name it. Now, wouldn't that be useful?



MY TOP 10 LEARNING SITES FOR PERSONAL LEARNING
Here are 10 amazing learning resources to explore for personal learning, especially if you are into e-learning and learning (Not ranking, just numbering):

1. Einztein
   
   A wonderful starting point to find free online courses with a bit of spice from top Universities. Also, the Academic Porthole is a great starting point, as it also includes OER guides to several learning domains.
   
   
   
2. iTunes U
   
   Here you can find more than 250,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other resources from many of the top Universities around the world. Since I am using an IPhone (and IPod), it is such a wonderful resource to feed me with recorded lectures for my long traffic jams every working day.
   
   
   
3. YouTube EDU and Academic Earth
   YouTube has aggregated all of the videos from its college and university partners - including luminaries like Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth - in one place. Academic Earth is an educational video website with the goal of enhancing the usability and expanding the awareness of OER, focusing first on video lectures. Since most of its resources are aggregated from YouTube, I have mashed both into one. Also, you can even grade the lectures (A to F) on Academic Earth. Cool!
   
   
4. TED Talks
   
   Hundreds of inspiring talks by the some of the most innovative and amazing thinkers and doers the world has to offer. And 95.5% of these talks are 20 minutes or shorter, meaning they are perfect for mobile learning. How on earth can we ignore such a resource (after discovering it)?
   
   
   
5. OLDaily (Stephen Downes)
   
   If you are looking for the latest news, trends, reflections, etc. in the (online) learning world, Stephen Downes is the ultimate synthesizer (that I have come across) of what is going on. I love the way he reflects and extracts the essence (or what he finds interesting) of all the articles, sites, tools, resources, etc. he discovers in his daily online newsletter (excluding weekends!). You might also want to also check out his homepage to discover all the other stuff he is doing, including his other excellent reflective blog (Half an Hour) and video recordings of all his presentations. While talking about Stephen Downes, we cannot ignore George Siemens and his elearnspace. He is the mastermind (together with Stephen Downes) behind Connectivism, the only learning theory that makes sense in the online learning world. His reflections and ramblings will keep you updated with e-learning, knowledge management, networks, technology, community development, and corporate learning.
   
   
6. Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (Jane Hart)
   
   If you want to find or know more about learning tools and how to use them to facilitate online learning that sizzles, then this site will serve you amazingly well. Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day is awesomely useful, and you won't be disappointed with her Tools Directory and Top Tools for Learning 2010. In addition, I love the fact that she provides us with a weekly round-up of the new learning tools added to the tools directory. Besides that you just have to check out her social media guides:
   
   

   • Introduction to social media for learning
     
   • Social Media for Workplace Learning
   • How to use Twitter for Social Learning
   • How to use Facebook for Social Learning
     
     

   These social media guides are simply a goldmine for anyone who is clueless, or wants to learn how to implement social learning in their teaching and learning environments. Also, don't miss her 100 Featured Learning Professionals, which will provide you with information, inspiration and/or interaction on a range of educational and workplace learning topics from around the world - via their blog, on Twitter or on other social networks. A life time worth of learning!
   
   
7. The Rapid eLearning Blog (Tom Kuhlmann)
   When you think about improving your rapid e-Learning, instructional design, PowerPoint or graphic creation skills, Tom Kuhlmann's Rapid eLearning blog provides you with a lot of great advice, tips, examples and short-cuts. Also, don't forget to get his free elearning ebook while you’re there. In short, this blog is easily my favorite 'Rapid e-Learning' learning blog! No doubt about that!
   
   
8. ELearningLearning (Tony Karrer)
   
   It is not really a list, but an amazing aggregator of excellent workplace or corporate learning blogs and posts filtered out by Tony Karrer. Just subscribe to this one, and you are basically subscribing to tons of great corporate or workplace learning blogs out there. Actually, it is a blog post repository in itself, and you will find the indexing, Monthly top featured posts, best from.., etc. very exciting (Well at least I did!). It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content.
   
   
9. Kapp Notes (Karl Kapp)
   
   If you want a blog that explores 3D learning, Second Life and learning games in general, this blog is certainly one of the best that I have come across.
   
   
   
10. iLearn technology (Kelly Tenkely)
    
    This blog is dedicated to giving teachers practical tips for integrating technology into the classroom. The learning stories are short, sweet and digestible. Perfect for the busy educator. Kelly you rock!
    

Besides these awesome learning sites, there are tons of other outstanding bloggers, sites, tutorials, learning games and tools to explore, but having a good starting, or knowing what sites that consume most of my online learning time should not be any harm.

YOUR TOP 10 LEARNING SITES FOR _________?

Alright, that was my top 10 learning sites for personal learning. What about you? Do you have any amazing sites to share from your learning domain? If you are interested to participate, simply share your Top 10 list through your blog, or using any learning tool convenient for you. Then, either blast me a comment with a URL to your list, or perhaps tweet the URL to the list using the following Twitter hashtag:

#T10LS

If many of you want to participate, I will setup a wiki (using Google Sites), whereby we all can collaborate to build. Actually, it would have been cool if someone like Jane Hart could use her magic to create something similar to the Top Tools for Learning 2010 for learning sites. Now, that would be awesome!

If no one is interested, too bad! At least you can enjoy my top 10 (personal) learning sites list above. Perhaps, whatever I have said, already exists. What do you think? :)

MedTutor - Learning to Think!

"No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined."
~Harry E. Fosdick

MEDTUTOR?

MedTutor is an online tutoring site for medical students and young doctors in Internal Medicine. The mastermind behind the MedTutor is Dr. Vela Menon, MD (Faculty of Medicine, International Medical University, Malaysia).

This project is still very much a work-in-progress, but then again that should not stop us from exploring it and providing some constructive feedback.



EXPLORATION

The first time I visited the MedTutor site, it was kind of refreshing, because the homepage is light-and-easy, and not overloaded with all sorts of links, text and images. One image, a sizzling quote, latest reflections from Dr. Vela Menon, and of course a site menu with links to other site resources and activities.

MedTutor is built using Wikidot (free and commercial version), which is a decent wiki tool that allows you easily to create web pages and invite others to participate in the development.

If you are thinking of embarking on creating a website together with a group, there are several other tools you might also want to consider, including Google Sites (cool!), Wikispaces, and Wetpaint.

Alright, let's get back to MedTutor and explore some of the site menu links. In the "Materia Non Medica" (Does this mean 'Non-medical material?) section, you will find a small collection of links to sites and articles that explore all sorts of stuff (e.g. The secret of doing a great job. Need that!). My favorite section is the 'Learning Bytes' one, where you will find some short and mind boggling case studies and Q&A activities (check out the Cardiac Arrest activity to get a taste). In the 'Journal Club" section, clinically relevant questions are asked based on publications in journals.

Interestingly, Dr. Vela is using MedTutor to facilitate learning activities (Renal and Diabetes modules) with his students. He invites (not forces!) them to register and participate, and for conducting online quizzes, he is using QuizStar. QuizStar enables you to create online quizzes for your students, disseminate quizzes to students, automatically grade quizzes, and view the quiz results online (here are 12 more free tools to create online quizzes).

In the 'IMU 10 semester' section, Dr. Vela has creatively used MedTutor (a wiki) for students to submit their case summaries about patients seen in the ward, clinic or during your on-call hours. Also, please check out the Learning Issues area, where he reviews students' submission and provides constructive feedback. If you look carefully, you will notice that he does not use the 'YOU ARE RIGHT/WRONG' approach, but instead triggers relevant questions for the students to reflect deeper on their findings and actions. In short, his approach is inline with MedTutor's slogan: 'LEARNING TO THINK'.

Finally, he has created a MedTutor Facebook Page, which he uses to share, interact, and keep students (and fans) updated with the latest happenings in MedTutor and beyond (96 fans! Oops, 97! Just became one!).



MOVING FORWARD
Dr. Vela was not born with an IPhone or IPad in his hand, and is a self-professed digital immigrant. Also, he was not instructed by the top management to develop MedTutor. I suppose his passion for education, and exploring ways to facilitate more effective and convenient learning drove him to conceptualize and build MedTutor. It is a great start, and a remarkable effort taking into consideration his background. Also, it just shows that today's (mostly free) learning tools available online (start here!) can empower anyone to create online learning environments, as long as one is willing to invest some exploration time to make it happen. Yes, he did struggle a lot initially building MedTutor, but can learning and building online learning environments be exciting without some form of struggle?

Having said that, what could Dr. Vela do to enhance MedTutor further?

Firstly, for case summary submissions and online quizzes, IMU E-Learning Portal (Moodle) could perhaps handle these two learning activities more efficiently. For case summary submissions, Moodle Assignment module could do a pretty good job, although the e-mail notification function might not always work the way we want. One could always post a selection of case summaries (with your comments for learning purposes) in MedTutor later (instead of all), if the students permit. As for online quizzes, Moodle's Quiz module is quite solid, especially in terms of features (e.g. Item analysis). Also, you can create questions quite efficiently using Notepad (add pictures and mathematical jumbo after upload, if any). Moodle is not perfect, but if used wisely it could solve some of our needs to conduct online learning activities in an organized and efficient manner.

Secondly, I would strongly recommend adding a blog to MedTutor to keep students updated with his reflections and things going on in the medical world. While the wiki is excellent for creating web pages and collaborative activities, it might not be the best tool for sharing explorations and discoveries as we learn. Instead, we could perhaps use a blog to provide an space for sharing and exploring experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas and resources with the readers. For such things, blogs are ideal (self-organizing: latest first, tagging, categories, etc.).

If you ask me, I would argue that blogging is one of the best ways to facilitate personal learning and reflection. Also, if we think on a larger scale, blogging when used for educational or learning purposes, is an ideal e-portfolio tool. It provides you with an excellent environment to integrate and reflect what you have discovered, experienced, created and learned. Also, it enables anyone to provide feedback in the comments section (unless disabled) on your own thoughts and reflections (peer-review). And if categories and tagging is used appropriately, one will have little trouble navigating and finding relevant information as the blog evolves.

As for which blogging tool to use, I would personally recommend Blogger, because it is user-friendly and feature rich. WordPress fans are going to disagree, but now that Blogger allows you to create 'Pages', too, why would you want to use WordPress (especially the free version)? Anyway, it is a personal choice, and if you start off with Blogger and then decide to switch to WordPress later, you can always import whatever you have done in Blogger with just a few clicks (So, no worries there!).

Beside a blog, I would also recommend to add a Twitter stream to share your quick thoughts, questions, ideas, and resources as you learn. While you might only have time to blog a few times a month, you could use Twitter more often to connect, update, share, engage and facilitate learning conversations on a more regular basis without too much effort (short 140 character messages). Of course, one could just update using the Facebook page (Wall), but with Twitter you will have many more possibilities to facilitate interactive social learning environments with those micro-messages (Looking for a starting point? Click here).

These are just two examples (or tools) on how one could connect and engage more students to learn and interact with MedTutor on a regular basis. In addition, it would be great if there were more resource links on the site, especially to relevant medical videos found on the web, and (bla,bla,bla)...

So...

Today, educators are empowered with so many possibilities to build online content and activities (where to start?). Besides building content and learning environments, we should not be afraid to use Open Educational Resources to reuse/remix/mash-up/adapt learning content. If the content is already out there and meets most of the learning requirements and is free-to-use (please use me!), we should not hesitate to use it to enhance the learning environment (though, selling the content would be a problem). Instead, we can then focus more on building interactive learning environments, connecting with students, creating content that does not exist (instead of the imaginary paraphrasing of existing content to avoid plagiarism, which strictly speaking is plagiarism!), and having more time to do research. Then again, it takes time to discover gems in this growing galaxy of learning resources (e.g. medical resources).

It is a challenge we all have to face sooner or later. Dr. Vela has managed with MedTutor to blend a bit of both, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

If you are interested in contacting Dr. Vela regarding MedTutor, use this e-mail address: medtutorwikidot@gmail.com

Lets' support and promote MedTutor! Why not build our own website exploring our learning area of interest? Yes, why not! Just give us a buzz :)