Elizabeth Losh

Writing Director, Humanities Core Course, U.C. Irvine

Teaching with Social Media: Blogs, Wikis, YouTube, and Second Life

Some Statistics about the new "Two Cultures": the Culture of Knowledge and the Culture of Information

• 83% of adult respondents thought that a twelve-year-old knew more about the Internet than their elected representative in Congress (Zogby 2006)
• 48% of all children six and under have used a computer, and 30% have played video games (Rideout, Vandewater, and Wartella 2003)
• 55% of youth 12-17 use social networking sites (Pew 2007)
• 57% of teens who use the Internet could be considered media creators (Pew 2005), a statistic that may be an undercount, because it does not factor in newer digital forms of expression or those that produce artifacts other than written texts (Jenkins/MacArthur 2006)
• While engaged in an average of 2.7 simultaneous Internet Message conversations, 39% of surveyed college students were also writing academic essays while multitasking online (Baron 2006)
• 71% of students at the University of Minnesota use Wikipedia; 28% cite it (Adams 2006)
• 36% of students in a U.S./Canada study admit to "cut and paste" plagiarism of sources from the Internet (McCabe 2004)
• 81% of faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences get digital resources from Google-type searches (Harley 2006)

The Importance of extracurricular writing (Lunsford 2007)

Early class collaborative hypertexts for content areas by George Landow and Alan Liu

The Second Life Project

Blogging and Composition

My first experiment with social media: The War from the Web

The Needs of the Humanities Core Course

Endnotes projects would be more pedagogically useful as wikis

Certain in-class exercises, such as a unit on German identities, suggest ways that blogs could be used.

Cultural literacy: pedagogical use of Facebook, multiplayer games, etc.

Thinking about podcasting differently from the one-to-many model

Personal Blogging at Virtualpolitik and Sivacracy and Contributing to Design Your Life

A YouTube Video about 2006

Exploring Facebook and MySpace

Some Principles for Using Social Media in the Classroom

The closer the connection to course content, the more valuable the use of social media

We have to be mindful of the privacy of our students when we expose them to the public sphere

We have to be conscious of the potential politics of academic labor (and this includes questions about faculty rewards)

We need to model appropriately academic uses of social media: YouTube shown for scientific experiments, scientific blogs, etc.

We need to stress connections between print media and electronic media: blogs that became books, video or interactive essays by academics, etc.

We need to think about issues of authorship and appropriation

We need to plan for discomfort when traditional roles and structures of classroom authority are disrupted

We need to have clear criteria for grading and evaluating student work that uses digital media