Social Media and the Modern Day Classroom

(I was invited to speak at Social Media Week on Social Media and the Modern Day Classroom. These are my remarks.)

I was hired at York University in 2006, and -- like most new faculty -- I was full of ideas and energy for transforming undergraduate teaching as we know it. At the time I was also starting to play around with blogs, so it seemed natural to try to bring the blog into the classroom.

My idea was to replace the standard course website with a blog: the unchanging details of the course (schedule, location, etc.) could still be hosted in some static place, but the blog would communicate the day-to-day details of the course. My first attempt, still online, can be found here. It was an incredible success: the blog formed the core of a vibrant community, which allowed the students to communicate both with me and among themselves. One student was even inspired to start his own blog, transcribing my course notes after each lecture. Not all of the feedback was positive, of course; I kept the commenting system open to allow anonymous comments, and students took full advantage to express their frustrations and problems. But this was also a huge positive -- too often, the professor gets a sterile view of how the students are doing, because nobody is brave enough to speak up.

So began my efforts to integrate social media into the classroom. In addition to blogs, I've experimented with three other social media sites: facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Each has its own unique features. Facebook and Twitter are quite similar: in Facebook, my approach is to create groups for each class; in Twitter, I create a class twitter account which students follow (and vice versa). These sites are, I guess you could say, "democratic" (although a less charitable word would be "anarchic") -- unlike a blog, there is far less room for the instructor to direct the conversation, and it shows. YouTube, though it re-creates the experience of listening to a lecture, turns out to be surprisingly passive: again unlike blogs, my students are reluctant to use YouTube's commenting features to leave feedback, which takes away from the sense of community (then again, perhaps this is not so surprising, since YouTube is comparable to the highly passive activity of watching television). In comparison, I would argue that the blog is as close as one can get in social media to the lecture: a blog post sets out a particular thesis, and permits an organized discussion on that thesis.

It's worth considering whether social media can replace the university classroom, and I'm going to cop out by answering "yes and no". For one thing, social media is unlikely to replace the small undergraduate class. To form a community based on social media, you need a critical mass highly committed "community builders", who are willing to jump in and participate in whatever media is in use -- be it a blog, facebook, or Twitter. In small classes, there simply aren't enough people to form a critical mass, so anyone trying to participate is left to feel awkward. However, for larger classes, social media does indeed pose an alternative to the traditional classroom order. We have already noticed the trend towards distance learning, so students are already willing to miss out on the impersonal 200-student lecture, even without social media tools at their disposal. A well-thought-out social media strategy, coupled with a high-reputation distance-learning program, could indeed recreate much of the classroom experience, and pose a viable alternative (or threat?) to the traditional university experience. The comparison between traditional universities and traditional media is chillingly apt.

Not because it is easy, but because it is hard

Today President Obama announced that the United States would not be returning people to the moon, or sending them anywhere else beyond Earth orbit. Now, people can certainly argue that robots are more efficient, and spaceflight is expensive, and blah blah blah. But I think I'll leave the case for manned space flight to the man who proposed the lunar project in the first place.

Formspring

Continuing my tradition of screwing around with "social media" sites, I'm now andreweckford on formspring. Here's Gawker's take on this question-and-answer service, although my goals for the site are more professional than personal.

Speaking of YouTube

White, middle-aged men should never rap -- they just end up looking like dorks. But I'll make an exception for this guy, 'cause if you're going to dork it up, you may as well go all the way. That mofo is ghost riding a Prius, yo:



[@IBMResearch via Gizmodo]

Disappointing arXiv paper title of the week

When I saw the paper Real Interference Alignment, I initially read the title as "Real-world interference alignment", but what they actually mean is "Real-number interference alignment".

This is not to criticize the paper -- Amir Khandani and his group do great work, and this paper looks nice. But I'm still hoping for a paper explaining how to achieve interference alignment under practical, real-world assumptions.

I won't be seeing you in Austin

For a variety of personal reasons (not the least of which is currently nine months old), I didn't get my act together to submit a paper to ISIT this year. I had a couple that I was working on, but they didn't come together in time. So I'll be missing my first ISIT since 2003 in Yokohama.

St. Petersburg is going to be a blast, though. Assuming the LHC hasn't destroyed the earth by then.

Information theory for the YouTube masses

I'm teaching a graduate-level course on information theory this term. As I've done with a couple of my other courses, I'm going to make video recordings of the lectures and post them online.

The course YouTube channel is here. As I've also done elsewhere, I'm organizing the video and course announcements on a blog, which is here. I just posted the first lecture -- this is still kind of experimental, so comments would be appreciated.

As far as I know, this will be YouTube's first full course on information theory. However, while searching for other IT-related material, I ran across this gem. Plus a slew of raging creationists and evolutionists, each using information theory to somehow try to prove their point.