Language, Words and stuff… Thinking about student note-taking and phone use..

I was privileged last week to teach a class on my colleague’s HM5204 New Media Literacy module here at Gloucestershire, which is part of the English Language/Linguistics area.

They are looking at the ways language responds to new, often social, media – and the way language is used in shaping those discourses we find on-line. Normally they are interested in things such as Critical Discourse Analysis, and the deployment of argumentation in on-line forums. However, last week they had to put up with my take on Social Media.

I had a lot of fun. I talked about twitter, periscope, grindr, yik yak, and things with even sillier names… We reminisced over old forms of internet use, back when we were all young.. Bebo anyone? Old enough to have asked a/s/l on IRC?

I’m not going to try and capture the detail here – but what was fun (for me) was that the usual tutor, Lucy, captured/summarised what I said, or what she thought were points that she could return to with the class. She did this by tweeting about them, using the session #hm5204. I tweeted before the session using that tag – and some students chipped in on the tag as well. We tried to display them on Twitterfall as they came on – better than my unreadable scrawl on the whiteboard. I was then able to capture this via Storify at http://storify.com/davidwebster/hm5204 . This set me to thinking..

Another colleague (not even in this dept.) was worrying about his students always being on their phones.. texting surreptitiously (not hard to spot, btw!).. playing Candy Crush, etc. So – we are going to disrupt their lives! Next class – we are going to get them to take turns (10 minutes per student maybe, so 5 get a go during the first class?) at being the class note-taker – via tweets, while others research what is being discussed as required, and tweet/screen capture -all appearing on twitterfall on the whiteboard-  then produce a collective Storify summary. This is not for an interactive seminar session – but I want to try this  with a conventional lecture format; as a way of getting group notes, keeping attention, allowing (even mandating) phone use – but keeping the whole group involved and engaged. It’ll be…   …interesting!  Report to follow.

Thanks to #hm5204 class – my RPE students will be doing this in classes too – assuming my guinea-pig session isn’t too disastrous..