Social Media in Education: November 12 - December 2, 2007

I'm Deirdre Bonnycastle, Clinical Teaching Development Coordinator at the College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan and social media junkie. Check out the Active Learning Blog Carnival, which will be published monthly and is looking for co-editors.

I'm looking forward to the session.

Hi,

I'm David Bell, a Senior Lecturer in Education Technology at Simon Fraser University where I've been for about a thousand years.

I'm very interested in Social Networks & am looking for ways that I can possibly use them in my courses & also discuss ways they can be used in the K-12 classroom.

I do have some concerns about some of the safety & privacy issues around these networks & hopefully I can find ways to address these concerns.

Hi. I'm Elaine Larson, director of education and product development (basically project management) for the Agency for Instructional Technology in Bloomington IN. In my work here (for a little over 5 years) I've been focusing on using digital media in education and have worked with various folks to help them "provision" their media for digital delivery. We have gone through that process with our own 45 years of video and other content.

For the past couple of years we have been working with an online professional development provider to repurpose their huge collection of digital learning objects to create new mini-collections of resources for teachers, instructional coaches, and other educators to access in an online learning community. Many of the modules we have developed focus on using technology, especially Web 2.0 technology to teach.

I also work as project director for an organization building an online suite of tools for teachers and students to access, use, share, and archive within their own virtual work space on our server. So, aside from being personally and professionally involved in using social media and networks, I am excited about the power of social media to help people of all ages learn.

I'm looking forward to this conversation. (Enjoyed the live session today--although I fear I spent too much time in the beginning trying to figure out how to use the technology--and where to plug in the headset! :>) I expect I can focus better next time.)

Elaine

Hello all. I'm an instructional designer with the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (SIAST).

When possible, I make use of social networking tools in the courses that I work on as I am a firm believer in the benefits of learners learning from each other.

I don't believe that social networking tool and sites are nothing but warm and fuzzy (many issues related to privacy, bullying, access, etc.), but it is exciting to see some of the ways that educators and informal learning communities are making use of them.

Alice Macpherson, at Kwantlen University College, in the Metro Vancouver area of BC, Canada.

I am the Professional Develop0ment and Prior Learning Assessment Coordinator at Kwantlen's Centre for Academic Growth.

I am seriously interested in the opportunities available and really looking for ways to encourage people to try e learning.

Hello!
Nice to meet you all.

I'm Barbara Dieu -Bee, as people call me online or Bee Kerouac in- world. I have been in ELT for more than 30 years now and am presently teaching EFL to students preparing their French baccalaureat at the Franco-Brazilian school in Sao Paulo. I am an amateur photographer and cook. I enjoy reading, listening to music, travelling, slow food and meeting people.

If social media means communication, I have been using it since 1997 in collaborative projects involving my classes and other students around the world and for professional development (e-mailing, forums, ICQ, photos, videos, Skype and more recently blogs, wikis and other tools popularly denominated Web 2.0). I belong to a number of communities of practice and social networking sites.

I blog at Wide Open Spaces

Looking forward to learning and sharing with you.
Bee

Greetings! The discussion has become quite informative and engaging already. I'm Cynthia Alvarado, a K-8 media specialist in Dearborn, Michigan. I have been engaged in various social media myself for several years and I am looking for acceptable ways to work it into my district's information literacy curriculum. I'm Cyndi Uriza in SL and I have a page in both MySpace and Facebook.

Hello all, Michael McVey here. I am an Assistant Professor in Educational Media and Technology at Eastern Michigan University’s College of Education. I am a Canadian ex-pat born of parents who are British ex-pats. So I feel a deep connection with my Canadian and British colleagues in this discussion. I live, by the way, four hours north of Tia and just down the road from Cynthia in Dearborn.

I am immensely interested in social networking as an educational tool. I moderated social networks for teachers since 1995. Some wrote that the network was a lifeline and a safety net, an island of professionalism apart from their isolation. One worked on a reservation in Montana, another in the Florida Keys, and others expressed the isolation of teaching in urban settings where their colleagues had lost their joy in teaching years before.

This winter I will be teaching a class on the tools and theoretical underpinnings behind virtual worlds, social networking, and online communities of practice. I am delighted to be a part of Scope and will try to add my voice more often during this forum (I had to bail on the last one – sorry, Diedre).

Hello, I am Marsha West. I have been teaching and facilitating online for several years, but I'm a little slow at getting comfortable with social media. (I'm very comfortable with straight asynchronous text conversation online.) I've finally been persuaded to join my family and colleagues on facebook. I've done a few Eluminate sessions. But much of what we'll be dealing with here is new to me and I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the next three weeks.

I'm Therese.

Shortly after I graduated in the late 80's, I worked for a company that made instructional and commercial interactive video/touch screen applications. Our most popular project was a drug and alcohol awareness interactive video for teens.

Things have changed since then.

I went on to work as an analyst and traveling consultant for 16 years. I took a breather to spruce up the old homestead and have a look at how the world was using technology. Once I saw Small pieces loosely joined I was smitten. I became interested in peer production, social collaboration and the creation of value through web enabled connectivity.

These days I work at the Center For Educational Technology at SFU. I help people implement and use new technology and find it a a challenge to keep abreast of the changes. It takes time and skill to produce a great video or run a successful collaborative project. I'm always interested in how we can use technology in simple ways and get good value for our time spent.

In this session I'll be soaking up your responses like a sponge, working behind the scenes to add them to our wiki and bookmarks. We have linked to a fine collection of social tools in the seminar description. We will be using them throughout this discussion and are happy to add more at your suggestion.

Blog: http://datadesigns.ca
SL: Tree Sewell

Hi,
My name is Cristina and I am a Portuguese in the UK.
I currently work with academic staff, assisting and stimulating them to incorporate learning technologies into their teaching and research approaches in a meaningful way.
I used to be an EFL teacher and am a proud member of the webheads in action.
I am really happy to be here.

Hi All,

Here's a brief introduction in the hope that I'll be able to follow along and take part in some of these discussions. My name is Nik Peachey and I work as a consultant / teacher trainer/ materials writer / instructional designer, and basically do whatever i can to keep my head above water. Prior to becoming a freelance I was managing teacher support websites for the British Council / BBC the main one being www.teachingenglish.org.uk. Over the space of 4 years I helped the British Council to develop these sites into an active 'community' of around 300k (mostly passive) user each month. Prior to this I had been working as a teacher, trainer and ICT trainer and materials writer in various developed and developing countries around the world ( Egypt, Ukraine, Singapore, Tunisia, Spain, Morocco and Italy) I'm now back in Morocco.

Nowadays, as I said, I try to make a living doing various jobs. I still work on some of the British Council's sites for English language teachers http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/ and http://searchenglish.britishcouncil.org/ and I've just volunteered to manage some of the IATEFL ( International association of teachers of English as a foriegn language) special interest group websites. The main one of these that may be of interest here is the Global Issues sig site: http://gisig.iatefl.org/.
I've also been working on dveloping course materials and TT materials for Second Life ( I'm Mark Kozhedub in SL)

When I'm not doing this, my 'hobby' and real passion is developing self access teacher development materials for my blog, which is aimed at helping teachers to use a range of learning technologies in their teaching. At the moment these live at: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ but I'm hoping that over the coming year I can find the time to migrate these onto a proper website which I hope will make them more accessible. Much as I love the audience interaction that a blog can generate, I'd really like to make the structure and navigation a bit more user friendly. Anyway, that's enough about me, Time to get some work done.

Best

Nik Peachey

Hi! I'm Gina Bennett, eLearning Specialist at a small rural college in Cranbrook, BC (in the Rocky Mountains region of Canada). Although I support all kinds of distance teaching & learning at College of the Rockies, our primary focus for the past 10 years has been on online delivery. I have been trying to promote greater adoption of social media for several years but the uptake is slow. I'm hoping for inspiration!

----------------
... and I'm Nomadia Nordwind in SL

My name is Maggie Verster and I live in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am currently doing my masters in computer based education and I am absolutely passionate about getting the teachers to use ICT in their classrooms. At the moment I am on a "blogging drive". I thought I will pick a tool at a time and get the teachers interested in web 2.0 tools...

As we are in the middle of end of year exams and marking, I promised to summarise what is happening here for my teachers to keep track of at my blog http://maggiev.edublogs.org, so I better get on with catching up....

Hi everyone,

Sorry for joining late.  I attended a conference in Tennessee but didn't take a laptop!  The horror!

My name is Carolyn.  I'm an instructional designer at the Nova Scotia Community College in Canada.  I work with faculty to develop and deliver online courses.  I recently co-facilitated a session (with my good friend Ian and others) for new faculty that involved some exploration with social media.

I'm excited about some of the opportunities that social media offer.  I see lots of connection and informal learning happening through these new tools.  A lot of my own learning happens through the conversations shared on blogs, in wikis, on Facebook (even though I'm hating the ads) and by participating in discussions like the ones we have here at SCoPE.  I'd like to learn more about how we can transplant some of those great practices into formal learning experiences.

I'm looking forward to the next few weeks.

Carolyn

 

Where to find me ... (please feel free to "friend" me)

Random Mind (blog)

Facebook

Orkut

Second Life: Carolyn Carillon

Del.icio.us

Skype: randommind

Slideshare

Another "late" entrant from Sydney, Australia. I work with academics who teach face-to-face and online using our uni LMS.

Look forward to catching up with the conversations....

Cheers
WL

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Keefer and I live and work in New York City. I am an instructional designer at a large healthcare organization, and I teach organizational communication in a business school here in Manhattan.

I am very interested in social media and how it is and can be used in education. As my student population is generally in the 20+ year old undergraduate, graduate, and adult groups. I am interested in this so I can learn more about ways of reaching my students.

With all of this I have started studying philosophy more formally, and in this way recognize that I am not the best at using social media with my own education, and think that the better I begin to use this myself, the better I may be able to reach out to offer support and learning challenges to my students.

And I'm yet another late joiner - with the simple excuse of "I forgot".
I'm a Lecturer in a School of Computing in Portsmouth, on the South Coast of the UK.
I've come from a teaching background, and like many other here, am very interested in using assorted social technologies to support students in their learning. (Under/post graduate; campus based/ distance learners; 18 year olds/mature students. etc)

I've a blog at http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog - and am Emmadw Rickenbacker in SL.

Emma