Guidance on using Social Media

A little while back, I had a few Twitter conversations and blogged about the need to develop some type of policy or guidance for academics on using Social Media.

From looking across a ton of different policies from the public and private sector, I felt that a policy was probably not the best way to go, especially as what I wanted was something more snappy and supportive. So, working with Neil Ringan (and a few others here at MMU), we've put together 8 key points that academics should consider when using Social Media, as it blurs the boundary across personal and professional domains. It's licensed with CC so feel free to reuse as appropriate.

(.PDF) Good Practice Guidance in the use of Social Media to Support Academic Practice

(.Doc) Good Practice Guidance in the use of Social Media to Support Academic Practice




This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Embedding Twitter in Moodle

As many readers will already know, Twitter has recently announced major changes to the use of their API. This has a range of knock on effects, not least potentially killing old embed codes, etc, but as things currently stand, there are still a number of options for you to embed Twitter in Moodle. I'm quite into using Twitter in the classroom, and have presented research at the SOLSTICE conference this summer. So it was important for me to find out what all these changes mean.
This post will review a few of these options, but remember, these may change further. N.B. If you don't want to read it all, scroll down to the bottom and watch the screencast...

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Twitter Widgets

There are a number of Twitter Widgets that can be customised (colours, etc) and embedded in Moodle. Access these by going into your Twitter settings (accessible via the cog icon in the top right), and clicking into Widgets.

You can create 4 different types of 'timeline' widget based on what it is you want to achieve;

• User Timeline - display tweets from a particular user's timeline
• Favourites - display a particular user's favourited tweets
• List - display tweets from members of a particular twitter list
• Search - display tweets matching a particular hashtag (#).

The major difference since the API changes, is the requirement of a Domain. If you wanted to embed the widget into a Moodle unit would need to enter the domain. e.g. moodle.mmu.ac.uk (you don't need to include the 'http://www' here.

When you are finished customising the widget, click the 'Create' button and you will see the HTML code that can be copied and pasted into Moodle (more on this later)...

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Buttons

As well as creating widgets, you can also create a range of Twitter buttons. You can access these by clicking into Resources link that appears underneath the Trends.

The four options here are to create buttons to carry out a specific function;

• Share a link
• Follow a user
• Tweet a Hashtag
• Mention a user

Each button has options to customise, e.g. links, hashtags, usernames, etc. Again, this shows a Preview window and provides the HTML code that can be copied and pasted into Moodle.

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What to do with the HTML code

In any of the above scenarios, you are presented with HTML code. You don't need to understand what this code is or does, beyond the fact that it's the magic to achieve your aim e.g. embed a timeline or create a button. Putting this in Moodle is surprisingly easy;

• Decide where you want the widget/button to appear e.g. 
• in a label within a week/topic (Add a resource > Label)
• or in a HTML block in the right hand column (Blocks > Add > HTML)
• You should see the pretty standard HTML editor (unless you are using Google Chrome). Look for the 'Toggle HTML Source' button on the editor toolbar - It looks like this: < >
• Pressing the 'Toggle HTML Source' button deactivates most of the buttons and leaves the plain HTML text view. This is what Google Chrome users would automatically see, as HTML editors in general have problems with Chrome (one of it's few downsides)
• Go ahead a paste the HTML code that you copied from the Twitter website, and click 'Save'.
• Voila

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Demo Screencast

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Hashtags & Retweets: Using Twitter to aid Communication, Community, and Casual (informal) Learning

Today I presented some early research from using Twitter with students over the past year, at the Solstice eLearning conference at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk.

You can view the slides below, or view them on Slideshare to see the annotations for each slide.

Would love to hear from others using Twitter or other SoMe tools in teaching and learning.

Hashtags & Retweets: Using Twitter to aid Community, Communication and Casual (informal) Learning

View more PowerPoint from Peter Reed

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Using Twitter in Teaching & Learning

I've been using twitter for over 3 years now, and have found it a great way to find/share information and engage with others with similar interests (whether that's eLearning topics or my beloved Everton FC). I had already posted my thoughts on Twitter some 2 years ago - many of which haven't changed. The one thing I wanted to explore was using Twitter within teaching, and luckily that now I'm in the position to implement this myself, the twitter 'movement' is at it's largest yet, with over 100 million users worldwide.

I've seen and read about others using twitter within their teaching and really think it can help bring students together to communicate. Bill Wolfe's post on 'Using Twitter in the Graduate Classroom' does a good job at highlighting some US-based work. He talks about the use of twitter as a back-channel and alludes to the development of a 'community' of learners - exactly what I hope to achieve.

I'm also interested to see how many of my students are part of this growing 100 million figure; if they welcome the use of twitter for their studies; and if they continue to use it with their colleagues beyond learning.

To start with, I've introduced a hashtag  - what twitter uses to record posts about a specific topic/idea, and I've used the Twitter Widgits to quickly show any 'tweets' with the course hashtag (#MM5362) directly in my Moodle area. I'm also building a twitter 'List' to display student aliases so they can each follow each other and build that community.

If you are aware of any research in this area or are interested in using Twitter in your teaching, feel free to get in touch - you can even follow me on Twitter


For those not too familiar with Twitter, I leave you with this introduction:





This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.