Learning Journal 6: Social Media in the Classroom

This was certainly an interesting experience seeing an attempt to integrate social media into the classroom.  On the one hand I see the appeal of this approach, especially in a large classroom environment where it can be difficult for the teacher to connect with every student and get every viewpoint.  However it’s important to remember that such integration must be careful controlled and planned.  It was obvious the live tweeting of our ideas on teamwork wasn’t as well conceived as it could’ve been given the anonymous nature of the medium we used it was far too easy to turn the proceedings into a caption contest.  I didn’t really feel that this was a good use of class time, especially given how similar our views on teamwork were.  It strikes me that what was really needed here was something to really encourage us to break the mold, maybe an activity that paired up different groups in a team working activity that we would deconstruct afterwards to determine how well teamwork worked in action as in the abstract all our ideas remain perfect but execution is the true indicator of their effectiveness.  Alternatively I could see something more geared towards getting truly out of the box concepts on teamwork forward, as I mentioned pretty much everyone had the same basic answers to the teamwork questions about communication, resources, understanding each other, basically a group-think consensus on what team work is.  It would be interesting to try and chip past that outer shell of assumption and really develop a deeper, freer understanding of the concept not limited by our ideas of consensus.