Fin de la nuit

Since I keep wondering about social media policy for teaching, it would seem a good idea to ask students to design a social media policy for the organisation they work for, or alternatively for their profession (eg  CIPR policy). This could be done as groupwork, eg via a wiki. Students could be grouped by course (ie all MATC together, etc), and if necessary, have two or more groups per course. I could refer students to a couple of existing policies to get them going. After that, the task could involve a Web quest and posting results to a Diigo list (one for the module).

It's not a PhD related idea, but who knows, it might becomes useful... It is still about using social media in teaching. Another idea during my long train journey back home last night: to incorporate Flickr in the Visual Comm module. I'll set up a group in Flickr, upload some pics for students to annotate and analyse in a Flickr discussion; students could also/preferably upload similar images for the group. Would be good for 'semiotics' task. I would need to do a quick Jing demo, to show students what I have in mind. In turn, that Jing demo could be used as discussion point (video demos would certainly interest the tech comm students).

Last night in on the train, I had an idea about my PhD work. Since it is an action research project, there will be different cycles. Who says where the cycle starts? So I thought I'd include my experiences with the online focus group that I held last June. In many ways, this was 'square one' since the group discusssed the potential and possible issues for the then proposed SMUO module. Obviously it wasn't set up to be part of the PhD work, so it was a 'naturally occurring event', but still, it is was gave me the PhD idea in the medium term. Here's what I wrote in the SHU CoLab Ning by way of analysis of this first Ning experience. I used Ning last summer as a platform for an online focus groups that brought together a group of past, current and prospective students. The point was to find out their views on a proposed DL pg module, which with their help, ended up being named 'social media uses in organisations'. I hadn't done that kind of on...

Recording thoughts about the first steps of a socia media journey is a bit like conducting a virtual reflexive ethnography. An ethnographer is always connected to the object of their research, which is why reflexivity is important. But let's not get all 'postmodern'... I am just thinking about Hine's book on Virtual Ethnography . In the ELSS course, we're asked to reflect on learning, with some of the learning also achieved 'by doing' (using SM) as well as by the traditional reading and online discussions. The course isn't about research, but having to maintain a blog reminds me strongly of my MEd project where I did something similar (but without public access). The 'field site' is the distributed environment (to use R&M's phrase) offering a rich social media ecology (Blogger, Flickr, Blackboard, Twitter and probably other platforms in future). Instead of going to a specific field site (eg Bb), I also followed field connections, eg links...