I Need Your Help: WordPress or Facebook?

This semester I am teaching completely online.  I am finding it to be quite challenging and have been thinking about chronicling my journey. I want to write a journal of my experiences in teaching all of my classes online this semester and I am trying to select the medium. 

I will discuss what I have done, how I have organized it, my challenges, how I am doing things, my strategies, etc. I hope that this can be something that will help me organize my thoughts as well as provide a venue for ideas, suggestions and commiseration from other educators.

My challenge is the medium. I was all set to make this an opportunity to learn more about WordPress and how I can use it when hosted through my GoDaddy account. Conversely, it would be quite easy to set up an open facebook group. What are the advantages/disadvantages of each? Which could I use to connect with more people?

What are your thoughts?  What are your experiences?

Z

Facebook in Education?

Are you using Social Media/Social Networking in your classroom?

I don't know about you, but a lot of this jargon is getting confusing for me. What is the difference between Social Media and Social Networking? Should they/Could they all be used in your classroom?

After a great deal of research, here is my understanding of the differences:

Social Media is user-created media designed to be shared through social interaction. This can take the form of blogs, forums, wikis, podcasts, social news, etc.

Social Networking is the process of building a social structure of individuals or organizations. It doesn't have to be done over the internet. We engage in "unplugged" social networking all day long. It is primarily the system for the social interaction used to share social media. It can include Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, MySpace, FriendFinder, Classmates, etc.

Looks like a confusion of the content with the process. Content being social media while process being social networking.  The funny thing is that each entity affects the other. Social media is determined by the content that will be interesting and the medium through which it will be shared. The structure of the social networking systems is determined by the media that is shared through them. I am beginning to refer to the "whole lot" of them as Social Technologies.

I was just working on some school work when I was interrupted by the periodic twirl of TweetDeck telling me that it has detected another Tweet from my designated searches.  Interestingly enough, it yielded a few interesting resources about Social Technologies in education.

Here they are:

• 7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers (Video)
• Facebook as a Learning Tool (Video) 
• The Facebook Classroom: 25 Facebook Apps That Are Perfect for Online Education
• Every Teacher's Must-Have Guidebook to Facebook.

Do you have any ideas for using Facebook in Education?

Z 

Photo: Some rights reserved by webtreats

How to Cite Twitter and Facebook - APA Style

Twitter and Facebook have DEFINITELY made an impact on Academia!!!!  APA Style now has defined how to cite them in a formal APA-formatted paper/article!

It's not even in the latest 6th edition of the APA Style Manual (you remember, the one with so many mistakes in its first printing that they had to call back all of those copies and have issued a reprint - the question is, how do you cite the second printing of the 6th edition?  =-)

Well, Chelsea Lee on the APA Style blog has provided guidance and examples for citing these social media sources. She says that these formats will work until more "definitive guidance is available." So I guess this means that she has received the blessing from the APA Oracles to share these rules.

Chelsea provides her guidance in two postings:

How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part I: General
This provides the format for just referring to a Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/barackobama or http://www.twitter.com/zeitz) or a Facebook presence (http://www.facebook/barackobama or http://www.twitter.com/zeitz)

How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part II: Reference List Entries and In-Text Citations
This posting refers to citing particular posts.  These posts need to reference both the source and the specific posting.  The examples are more complicated than I want to post here so I will leave you to click on the title link to see how they work.

I teach a Seminar at the University of Northern Iowa on Writing a Graduate Paper.  I find it humorous how paranoid students get when they have to write in APA format. It becomes a barrier to writing because they are afraid that they don't know everything there is to know about APA.

IT'S ONLY A FORMAT, FOLKS!!!!!

By the end of my class, I have tried to demystify APA and convince the students that the important part of their writing is what they say and how they organize their thoughts.  The APA format is only to ensure consistency between authors and it can be implemented (and refined) towards the end of the writing process.

Sometimes it works . . . =-)

Trying to format the plethora of sources available in the world today is a moving target and I take my hat off to the folks at APA.  It's genius to run a blog that can be used to channel recommendations about formatting sources between their editions that are published about every 6 years.  It's just that educators shouldn't take the format's importance to the point of squelching creativity and original thought.

This posting about referencing Facebook and Twitter is only a small part of the many suggestions available.

What is your opinion about APA and how it's importance in teaching writing in schools?

Related articles by Zemanta

• AMA, MLA and other formats should DIE (zaid.posterous.com)
• APA Overview (slideshare.net)

5 Facebook Dangers (not involving predators)

"Wow Man!! I was SOO wasted!!"
"This job is really boring."
"I think that I am getting tired of my girlfriend."

These are all phrases that can get people into BIG trouble when they share them on FaceBook. FaceBook is a great way to communicate with your friends and share what's happening in your life, poorly selected photos and descriptions of your adventures can cause SERIOUS problems in getting jobs, being admitted to college, or even being sentenced in the courtroom.

Jackie Burrell's article, The 5 Facebook Dangers, in her Young Adults About.com column, provides an important list of ways that poor choices in postings can affect their futures in school, jobs, and court prosecutions.

Students don't realize how much their presence on the Web will affect their futures. Every semester, I discuss this issue with my university students and the fact anything they post on the web will "be there forever."  They see their social networking sites as great places to share things with their friends, but they don't consider the fact employer and admission offices search the web to find out information that isn't conveyed on their job/school applications.

Be careful what you post because it just might come back to haunt you in the future. 

BTW, related to Facebook but unrelated to what I have been discussing, I just found some research by Aryn Karpinski reported in April, 2009, compared the grades of students who use FaceBook to those who don't. They surveyed 219 students from Ohio State University and found that Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5.  Students in the study who didn't use FaceBook had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0. They also found that FaceBook users spent an average of 1 - 5 hours a week studying and non-users studied between 11 - 15 hours.

It should be noted that this research DOES NOT find a causal relationship between low school performance and using FaceBook. It merely found that those who used FaceBook tended to have lower grades and study less. Chances are that if they didn't use FaceBook, they would have found other distractions instead of studying.

Another question is how can university students have a 3.0 GPA average with only 1 - 5 hours of studying per week?  I have plenty of ideas about that, but that deserves another posting.

David Warlick: PLN; A Gardener's Approach to Prof Learning

Warlick is beginning by talking about the different bloggers that he follows. He talks about those who have good original ideas and those who filter other blogs.

3 aspects of PLNs:

• Web 2.0
• Mining the Conversation
• Mapping the Conversation.

Notes that he uses MindMeister to plan his presentations.

Wikis: He claims that he doesn't understand why he has a Facebook account. He uses his wiki to make his connection with his readers.

Twitter: Says that if he tried to explain it, we would say "why would we use it?" He notes that twitterers love it because they have a direct line to new things. Some people won't go on vacation because they don't want to leave twitter. Used the Twitter Search. Spoke about using TwitterPic to find out about a pyramid that he saw while on a trainride.

Second Life: Talks about the unusual experiences he had when he gave a speech in Second Life.

Nings: turns out that about half of the 200 people in the room don't know about nings. Nings developed by the same guy who developed the first web browser, Mosaic. Just shared the Classroom 2.0 ning. Now shared the learning 2.008 ning for the conference in Shanghai.

Blogs: "The Blogosphere is the exhaust of the human mind." Shows Technorati (Blog search engine). Just did a search of Technorati about "cartography". Technorati allows you to search specifically in Posts, Blogs, Videos or Photos. (this makes it much more functional than search.google.com) Just showed a blog called Strange Maps - hmmmm, interesting.

Delicious: Showed how he is using Delicious to sort and store and search resources.

It has been a good presentation and I like how he is sharing his PLN. Good job, David.

Z