Professors find strong teaching tool in social media

Whether through its ability to facilitate publicizing an event or cause to several thousand people at once, or through the ease with which it allows feedback on a product or idea to be gathered in great detail, social media has expedited the dispersion of information on a grand scale in recent years. Such a revolution has had a profound effect on the field of education. Associate Professor Calvin Gidney, who teaches Introduction to Child Development, is one of the many advocates for the use of social media in college classrooms. For the last several years, Gidney has been using a Facebook group to post articles pertaining to the material he teaches in his classes for his students to read in their free time.

“It’s a space where we can have out-of-class discussions about relevant issues that are in the news related to child development,” he said.

According to Gidney, Facebook is an effective medium for inciting dialogue about articles due to its commenting function, which allows students to instantaneously post their thoughts and respond to one another. However, Gidney only uses posts and comments on articles as an extra credit opportunity for students.

“I do want to encourage students to participate, but I don’t want to make it obligatory,” Gidney said. “I want Facebook to be a place where students read articles on child development because they think it’s cool and is something they would do [in] their free time anyways. It’s what makes a university such an exciting place to work, because you’re involved in this world of ideas for fun, and we all enjoy it.”

Gidney also sees Facebook as a good substitute for email because it allows him to relay information to his students in a way that's more accessible.

“All of us at this university get too much [email]," he said. "It’s something that students ignore. I personally hate threaded discussions on email, but Facebook takes that process [into] a space that you can go to when you want to. It’s a place to go to during downtime.”

Gidney does, however, keep directly course-related material strictly on Trunk.

“I don’t want [compulsory aspects of the class] on Facebook because I like to keep a separation between leisure time and work time,” Gidney said. “If tests and things start to bleed onto Facebook, that would make it more like a work site.”

For first-year Evan Fantozzi, a student in Gidney's class, the separation of mandatory and optional work makes reading academia-related articles during his free time easier and more natural.

“Just like people post BuzzFeed videos about cats, and others having the social media instinct to click on them, the same thing happens for me with the Child Development articles,” Fantozzi said. “I don’t really think about it too much [when I click on the link], but I usually end up enjoying it and learning a lot. It’s a good way of getting us to learn in the off-hours.”

While Introduction to Child Development has only 61 students enrolled this semester, there are over 300 people in the Facebook group. Students who've taken the course in the past, as well as several friends of Gidney's, remain part of the group, according to Gidney. He believes that the ability to enable current students, alumni and professionals from various fields to interact makes the page a valuable asset for students.

“It’s a really fun, intellectual space where current students can interface with alums of the class [and vice versa],” Gidney said.

Unlike Gidney, Associate Professor Richard Eichenberg, who is teaching Introduction to International Relations this semester, realized the value of social media in teaching by chance. In an effort to get information out to students quickly during this semester's snow days, Eichenberg created a Twitter account for his class, but soon became aware of its other uses.

According to Eichenberg, the snow days made him realize that Intro to IR was missing a key characteristic of a good class: a sense of community and cooperation between students and himself.

“The main purpose of the Twitter feed was to keep the community alive, functioning and thriving during the snow days,” Eichenberg said.

Like Gidney, Eichenberg also used his social media platform of choice to share articles relevant to the topic being discussed in the class at the time.

“Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was provoking a lot of thoughtful commentary on the web, and scholars were writing opinion pieces which were highly relevant to the theories we were covering in the class,” Eichenberg said. “The Twitter feed was a good way for me to quickly shoot out a message [to my students].”

After noticing the benefits of utilizing a Twitter feed, Eichenberg is considering making his Twitter account an essential part of his curriculum in future semesters.

“I did not feel that I could make it required after the course was already underway because some people have Twitter accounts, some people do not,” Eichenberg said. “But from now on, especially for my large classes like Intro to IR, I will definitely make it an integral part of my class every time I teach it.”

According to Gidney, the existence of university-owned platforms such as Trunk prevents social media from becoming a universal academic tool. At the same time, however,  he acknowledged the possibility that social media platforms might grow in academic importance.

“It might be like YouTube,” Gidney said. “At first, I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, a gazillion videos of cats doing things.’ But now, YouTube is an integral part of my teaching, and happily a lot of other people's teaching. I’m [currently] skeptical about Facebook, but you never know.”