Social Media on CampusProfessors in the Blogosphere

As more college instructors embrace social media as a way to create, deliver and consume educational content, you can’t help but wonder what the college experience will be like in a few years. Facebook, podcasts, YouTube and even Twitter are becoming common tools for a cadre of social media-savvy professors who are abandoning the “sage on the stage” approach and engaging students in collaborative learning environments enabled by social media.

But does this mean that the properly footnoted and formatted term paper, once a leading indicator of one’s writing and reasoning abilities, will one day be replaced by a student’s YouTube, podcast, or, with apologies to your high school English teacher who helped you perfect the five paragraph essay, a 140-character tweet?

Perhaps, but not everyone has joined the social media bandwagon, and there are strong opinions on both sides of the discussion about whether social media can improve the learning experience. Some schools are moving cautiously, while others, like the University of Missouri are incorporating Facebook, podcasts, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube into their daily work-flow and teaching routines.

Missouri sees social media as a way to compensate for budget cutbacks, allowing professors to do more with tools that enhance their productivity. But this is hardly an issue centered on campus financial matters. Many educators see social media as a way to appeal to different learning styles and to bring real-world—if not real-time—events into the classroom.

The director of MU’s campus writing program and author of Rhetoric of Cool, Jeff Rice, sees social media skills as a potential competitive advantage in the job market. Recognizing that more employers were seeking social media-savvy graduates, Rice set up a blogging program in 2007 for English composition students. He stated in an August 2009 article in the ColumbiaMissourian.com that “The [social media] applications may come and go. But you have to think about social media as a concept. The concept is going to be around for a while.”

But aren’t students who come of age in the Facebook era already social media-savvy? Not necessarily. Knowing how to use certain applications doesn’t guarantee that the results will be interesting, useful, or elegant. Indeed, does the ability to type words on a keyboard yield sentences that rival the work of Hemingway?

Apparently Rice, while not trying to produce mini-Hemingway’s, did feel that writing skills are going to be an important part of the social media solution going forward. Thank goodness. Next to email, the web-log or “blog”, as we’ve come to know it, is one of the oldest social media applications on the block. Dinosaur that it may be, the blog can also be one of the most elegant and effective tools around.

I’m reminded of Richard Craycroft, a popular English professor at BYU, who several years ago when asked what he thought about a particular topic, responded with: “I don’t know. I haven’t written about it yet.” Today he would probably do a blog post so we would know what he thinks.

With Dr. Craycroft in mind, what do you say we take a quick tour and visit a few professors in the blogosphere:

• An excellent example of elegant thought in action is a blog by Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor 1993-1997. Reich currently teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, and maintains a personal blog where he posts his observations on the economy and current political events.




• Kurtis Williams, an astronomy instructor from the University of Texas writes a student-oriented blog on astronomy.





• Cathy Davidson, a professor of humanities at Duke University uses a blog as part of her teaching curriculum.




• John Lee, a math instructor at the University of Washington uses a blog in his class, Geometry for Teachers.




• Kevin Patton, an anatomy and physiology instructor at St. Charles Community College, writes a blog for students and instructors. Patton is also the author of two popular textbooks, so his blog reaches well beyond his own students into the lives of those instructors and students using his books.




• Tomorrow’s Professor Blog is a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to discuss issues in higher education. Their June 23, 2009 entry, for example, titled “Handling Problems, Pitfalls, and Surprises in Teaching: Some Guidelines” discusses key tips for implicit behaviors and expectations in the classroom, such as a how to handle a student who monopolizes a classroom discussion.



• Female Science Professor, a blog where an instructor anonymously shares thoughts about her profession and some of her most personal teaching experiences.


• Law Professors Blog is a combined network of blogs written by law professors for law professors. Lawyers who like to write. Fancy that.


• Biz.edu lists the top 50 business professor blogs, including one by Yuping Liu, a marketing professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies consumer behavior on social networks. Really interesting stuff.


• Top Online Engineering Degree has the top 50 engineering professor blogs.

No, it's not your father's (or mother's) college campus anymore. Social media is changing the way education is created and consumed. But take heart in knowing that content still appears to be king, and thanks to some adventurous academics using social media and the blogosphere to help us find the answers ... that content has never been better.

Or as Hemingway might say: "The shortest answer is doing the thing."

Contributor to this post: Miachelle DePiano