As I've said many times, most of our students come to our institution with mixed goals. On the one hand they've been successful high school students and they want to keep doing in college what they know they were good at in high school: listening in class, taking notes, doing homework, and taking tests. On the other hand, they themselves live in social networks; I won't bother to point you to an article about this because you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last five years to miss how the under-20 set uses texting, Facebook, and other sites like Twitter as their primary means of communicating with their friends. And Hofstra faculty don't live under rocks. So I don't need to beat that drum.
So our students come to college knowing that the life they like to live happens in social media; but also that success in school comes from doing what they did in high school. This leads to the mixed messages faculty get in college classrooms: some students would love to have part of class in Facebook, some students just want to sit in the back of the class with their mouths shut for the entire semester, and you'll find every level of enthusiasm for interaction in between these two extremes as well.
This year, however, I'd say that colleges have to step it up a notch: increasingly, students are coming to us from high schools where they've had all the usual tools of modern instruction, and frankly, they've had better experiences with it than they're about to have in college. K-12 environments, if they have things like BlackBoard or SmartBoards in their classrooms, often mandate their use more consistently, and train their teachers more consistently to use those tools, than most universities can do. At a university each faculty member usually makes his or her own decisions about how to teach (for-profits excepted), and this is a benefit of the U.S. higher education system: students will be exposed to a lot of different teaching styles during their college degree. Unfortunately, to students it sometimes looks disorganized, old-fashioned, out of touch, or simply thoughtless. Most students like it when the faculty know their names; they also like it when faculty are thoughtful in their use of technology, at the very minimum using it to announce class changes in a timely and consistent way, post documents, gather assignments, and just generally keep the class running in an organized fashion.
So then how do we step it up a notch and integrate social networking in a responsible way? The pluses for it are not that new: when done right, what you want is for your students to be thinking about your class everywhere, all the time. How much would you give for your students to see the everyday pertinence of your class everywhere, all the time? Isn't this a major goal for every faculty member? In my career I've wanted students to see the everyday applicability of clear sentences and paragraphs, or understanding cultures different from that of the United States, or being able to find a responsible academic source supporting a point. I can't imagine a field we're teaching in which we don't want students to see our subject matter everywhere they look: from the calculus student who realizes that she needs calculus to find out how much water her town will need to buy to fill their swimming pool this summer, to the art student who recognizes chiaroscuro in the latest fashion ad - and realizes he could make something just as good.
I'd apply all my same rules for any class activity having to do with social networking - students need to get credit for doing it, even if it's credit/no credit; it needs to be a regular, repeated part of the class, not just a one-off for a week that they can ignore; and it should contribute to your specific goals for the class.
I'm in the same boat as all of you. I need to do SOMEthing for this year, and I have a smallish seminar to teach. So what tool to choose - and how to design an activity? There are blogs and wikis in Blackboard, and a discussion board, but as those of you who've used them know, they're a far cry from true social networking, with its democratization of discussion, ability to connect to phones (our students' equivalents of laptops), and ability to share all kinds of media and comment - all very easily.
Some of our faculty are very excited about Google+, and on the face of it, it's an excellent answer. It's just like Facebook but not Facebook, and all our faculty and students now have access to Google Apps through our portal.
The challenge with Google+ at Hofstra right now is that it isn't actually included in the base set of apps Google provides for us. You can have your students manually create Google+ accounts with their Hofstra Pride gmail addresses, though, and then manually create a circle just for them. Remember Google+ is still a beta, which is computerese for "you get what you get". Google will undoubtedly be uncovering bugs and fixing things for years to come, in that Google way. But it is a very nice option.
If you use it, be sure to log in during class for a few minutes and show students how to create a class circle and share just to that circle. Students shouldn't be posting class work to the world unless they're aware they're doing so, and while I find circles very intuitive and sensible, not every student will do so. On the plus side, at least if they're doing it in Google+ with you instead of Facebook, they're much less likely to accidentally spam all their high school friends and family with their homework assignment!
Twitter is still a great tool for these things as well. I like choosing hours of the day when students' tweets can get texted to my phone (no texts after 10 p.m.!) and how easy Twitter is. My problem there is that I follow a lot of OTHER people on Twitter as well, and some of them follow me. I may well annoy some regular Twitter friends if I start tweeting about global media any hour of the day or night; I have to make a decision about whether or not to mix my class in with my professional and personal contacts there, OR set up a separate Twitter account just for class activity to share with my students. Just like Google+, students would also have to send me their Twitter accounts - either their regular ones, or ones they set up just for my class. If I expect students to be reading each other's tweets as text messages, I should provide an option(like checking the Twitter feed once a day) for those students who, rightfully, don't want their phones beeping at them all day with class observations. (We should be so lucky!)
If you use Twitter, I recommend you agree on a Twitter tag with your students - and check first to make sure it's unique, as #sociologyclass may happen more often on Twitter than you think! Let them know only posts labeled with the appropriate tag for your class will be counted for credit. You can't be chasing all their tweets all over the place, and with a hashtag, you can set up a page that just shows that feed and follow it very regularly.
I like Ning for class interactions a lot. It looks and behaves much like Facebook, and you can try it for 30 days for free or buy a simple $3/mo account to set up a class for yourself. It's super-easy to customize and lets students share pictures or videos in ways they're used to. Because it's private, log-in accounts only, students aren't doing their classwork in "public". You set up your site - yourclass.ning.com - and only the accounts you create or allow can log into that site at all. It's a great way to have students interact with each other as well as with you, which should always be a goal. It would be a great tool for having students share, for instance, pictures of things they saw during the day that relate to the class topic, or news items, or videos from YouTube. The only downside to Ning is that you have to ask students to check it periodically (preferably every day) in addition to checking Blackboard. But this would likely be true of Google+ as well. And like all the rest of these tools, because it's a consumer tool, not a University-provided tool, you need to add and remove your students yourself from the group.
I recommend avoiding Facebook for reasons we already stated, but we do have Inigral's tool Hofstra on Facebook, which allows students to socialize in an app that's connected to Facebook but not Facebook. If you've heard about this product from your students, I would still recommend steering clear of it for teaching because it is intended for students' social purposes, not for teaching; any teaching taking place in it would be "public", meaning all Hofstra participants in the app could see it; and faculty accounts are not provisioned by default to the system. We are running this application on a trial basis; I would not want to steer a teacher towards it.
So none of the choices are perfect, but there are several choices. Of Google+, Ning, and Twitter, what suits your goal best? Twitter restricts the length of the posts pretty severely; on the other hand, a lot of social activity happens there now (news of yesterday's earthquake traveled on Twitter before any major news outlet was carrying it - people read their friends' tweets about the earthquake in Virginia, and then felt it themselves a few minutes later in Ohio or New York!). Fascinating political and social commentary is constantly being posted there as well, making it great for any social science, media, business, teaching, or communication topic. Google+ and Ning both give you great non-Facebook, Facebook-like social networks, with all the media sharing possible - great for humanities classes, writing, art, television production, and similar.
Faculty Computing Services is familiar with all these products, but to varying degrees of familiarity. If you'd like our help getting started feel free to give us a call (all our contact information is at http://hofstra.edu/fcs as always). We also have some tips and ideas for getting started at http://hofstrateach.org - I usually look something up there myself to answer my question first. But these are consumer-level products, not enterprise-level products, so to a certain extent, if you decide to use them, you're taking a leap into social networking as an individual with your particular students. It's the wave of the future, but it might feel a little deep. If you decide to take the plunge, just keep swimming!
As with any electronic tool, I'd recommend that you structure use of the tool for your class:
1. Ask students to visit or read at least once a day. Spell out in your syllabus that this is a requirement for the class and students will not pass your class without participating in this activity no matter what fraction of their final grade is made up of this type of participation.
2. Require students to contribute at least once a week. (This can be based on class reading - what questions came up for you when you did the reading? - or based on outside-of-class activities - post an example of modernist architecture you saw in your neighborhood, or a book you found in the library on this topic, or an interview you did with a friend or family member on this question.)
3. Give credit - even just a 1 instead of a 0 in the Blackboard gradebook is sufficient. Give credit every week so students can see how they're progressing.
4. Bring that class interaction back to class. I recommend participating yourself on the same guidelines, but even if you don't, when you meet with your students, if you bring back the discussion ("As we saw from Brian's interview on Ning this week"... "This photo Sheila posted demonstrates exactly what we've been talking about"...) you make your class alive, current, and happening all the time.
5. Base a test question or paper writing opportunity or capstone presentation option or any other sort of assessed exercise on material that's been shared or insights the class has reached together via their social networking discussions. If you just use the same questions you used last year, you disconnect. If you draw on the discussion your students have been having, via social networking as well as in class, you bring it all together and involve the students in the class more than you can imagine. The smallest link helps a lot. DO NOT make it an "optional" question. If you're using social networking, you're using it, and it's a required part of the class - "optional" isn't an option.
There may always be a student or two who still drops out of online discussion, just as there can be such a student who drops out class, but you need to focus your discussion on the students who are participating, enjoying, and learning. Do let such students know as soon as possible that they will not be able to pass the class until they connect.
Every once in a while there is a student who is still uncomfortable with technology, sufficiently to inhibit them in participating in such a class exercise. This fall, for the first time, you can send such students to Learning Support, a new division of Student Computing Services based out of the Learning Lab in Calkins 106. Trained student support personnel will help them. You can learn more about Learning Support at http://hofstra.edu/learningsupport - our new website will be populated by September 1!
