We're one month or so into "Law, Culture, and Identity" and things are in full swing! Students have just turned in their first batch of papers, and I'll be putting up the first student-authored posts later this week - very exciting! I wanted to take a few minutes today, though, to talk about the course's twitter component, and how I'm using it to pedagogical ends.
I'm fine with a pedagogical transparency (most of the time), so it's worth enumerating the goals I'm trying to achieve by requiring these tweets, and not too early in the semester to take stock of how those processes are going.
Goal #1: Get Students to Look for Law Everywhere
This course's tagline is "law is everywhere, so we will look for it everywhere." It seems not only reasonable but perhaps necessary to get students to look around outside of the classroom if I want them to understand how pervasive laws, norms, and rules are in our everyday life. To ensure that students put their environments under the microscope - at least every once in a while - I require that they tweet examples of law at work in those environments. It's a straightforward instantiation of a key course goal, and social media is the perfect medium to communicate the far-reaching effects of the law.
Even a cursory look at the twitter feed shows that the students have embraced this mission. Tweets about rules/norms in dining halls, apartments, buses, the NFL, libraries, and more are filling the feed, dramatically expanding the universe of examples of law and culture at work available to students.
Which brings me to a second, no less important goal.
Goal #2: Harness the Power of Peer Learning
There is no shortage of studies showing that students learn material better when they use each other as pedagogical resources in addition to an instructor. Group work is the most common way to harness the inherent advantages of peer-to-peer learning, but it isn't the only way.
No matter how much confidence I may have in myself as an instructor, and no matter how creatively any instructor presents material, it can still only be one person presenting examples and illustrations as one person perceives them. But as a group, my class is far more creative and far-reaching than any one of us could ever hope to be on our own. Even if every student tweets only twice (the minimum requirement), that means over 90 different, creative, examples of the law at work that students would not otherwise have been exposed to. Twitter enables both the number of "instructors" to radically expand, as each student is teaching each other when they tweet, but radically expands the conceptual size of the classroom. Now, wherever any one of my students is, there is an opportunity to use twitter to bring that space into the class (digitally, anyway).
Goal #3: Informal Assessment
It also gives me, as an instructor, more than 90 discrete opportunities to informally gauge student learning. Every time a student tweets, I can ask myself "does this student get the concept they are trying to illustrate?" It's informal, and certainly imperfect, but in combination with other assessments it's another way for me to take the pulse of the class and of individual students more regularly. (And, if you're reading this, students, so far the answer has always been yes.)
-------------------
Requiring students to tweet may seem like a simple add on, or even a pandering attempt to make the class more modern, but it's not actually either of those things. Twitter has let me engage student learning outside the classroom, actually expand the spaces in which student learning takes place, harness the incredible power of peer-to-peer teaching, and given me more opportunities to determine how well students are learning (and adjust lesson plans accordingly. It's a simple tool, but one with loads of possibilities that we are only just learning to exploit in the classroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment