I was working on some adjustments to next semester’s course schedule, and I had a cool social tech moment that I want to share.
When I am looking at classes to take, I have a couple of places that I will check to see if I want to take the course:
- PickAProf or RateMyProfessors
- Friends
- Google:
- The instructor’s name just by itself (i.e. “Albert Einstein“)
- The instructor’s name within UT’s domain (i.e. “Richard Feynman site:utexas.edu “)
- The course number or name (i.e. “RHE 312“)
Searching for these websites will often get you to an old course website or syllabus from previous semesters. For one of the classes I was looking at (”Computers and Writing”) I ended up coming across the instructor’s website , and from there, I found his Twitter. I tweeted that I was looking at his blog and considering the class and within a minute, he had responded to me!
I think that this is a really cool example of how social tech can facilitate and enhance the way that we do things in the university environment. Having the ability to instantly connect to people in an informal manner can be great for students and the community at large. In this particular case, having Twitter and John’s blog/course website created a great back channel for instructors and students.
Having that course website to look at brings up another good topic (perhaps to elaborate on another day); why don’t more professors put more content from their courses on the real web (and not locked behind the walled-garden of Blackboard)?
Tags: blogging · instructors · Twitter2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
Thanks for your interest in the course (unfortunately, the course site you link to is down this week for some upgrades).
I agree that finding info on classes is absurdly difficult. The information on sites like RateMyProfessor can be difficult to take seriously; when I taught in Tennessee, we used to call it “Hate My Professor.” Hopefully the direct access model that you describe here will become more commonplace. I’m aware of at least five instructors in the Dept. of Rhetoric and Writing who are on Twitter, although I don’t know how easy they make it for students to find this out.
Final note: you may be interested in reading this post by a prof. at UT-Dallas: http://twurl.nl/mz4nko. He recently crowd-sourced the syllabus to his course and is now trying to figure out how to offer the class for free to non-students.
So I’ve been thinking about this since I saw you connect to John on Twitter, David. I wonder how many of my potential students are on Twitter, and if any of them know I’m there.
I love the idea of using Twitter to test out ideas before bringing them to the classroom and Twitter would be the perfect place to periodically remind students of upcoming deadlines, as well as share interesting links relevant to course content. Students could also get a sense of the other things I do outside the classroom, which could help us get to know each better.
My Twitter updates already go to my Facebook wall so maybe students will get that info there if they’re not on Twitter. It would also be pretty cool if I could send Twitter updates to Blackboard, too! Especially if I could use hashtags to send only specific tweets.
Interesting stuff all around, for sure.