Reluctant Twitterite (Me) Moves to Supplement Social Work Research Instruction for MSW Students

Twitter.  Sigh.  I use it, but don't quite "get" it.  Of all the new technologies out there that I have tried to learn about, this one stumps me the most.  I know that there are professors out there who have successfully harnessed it in support of target learning outcomes.  However, I have not yet seen a way that professors in social work have used it - the physicists and political scientists are, apparently, having a field day.  It has been on my back burner for a while now, the goal of developing some useful sort of way to add Twitter into my teaching.  To tweet or not to tweet - in class and out.  That is my question. Well, at least my question of this moment.

For those not in the know, Twitter is a "microblogging" site on which you can send out messages of 140 characters or less.  I don't know how they settled on that, but that's what it is.  I use it to share articles and links of interest with a a cadre of social work professionals interested in disability, child welfare and social work education.  Although I only do this circa 1 time per week, I often find links of interest to my students on a range of topics.  It has been a neat resource - but I often feel I do not use it optimally, thus, back to the question, to tweet or not to tweet?

So, as my question of the day focused on tweeting in the classroom, you make ask why.  Well, Twitter raised its ugly head today, in my classroom.  Stewing on the way home, I went over the scenario in my head several times.  Generally, today's class went well and my students seemed fairly engaged during a mock IRB small group activity.  I only had to remind one person to put down their smartphone in the midst of class.  The response? Wait for it.  "Just checking my Twitter to see what's happening with my family."  Inside, I boiled.  The students let out a combination of snorts and guffaws.  Sort of a spectrum ranging from silence to snort to giggle and on to guffaw.  Then all heads swung over to me. You know, the "what's she gonna do now" look. 

Now, I knew that the student in question was experiencing a significant family transition, but I still deemed this behavior unacceptable and the nonchalant response a bit disrespectful.  I was, however, ready.  I reminded my students about what they nicknamed the "loser-takes-all" rule.  At the next infraction, I will unveil my fancy new red spray-painted basket painted in late August in anticipation of this moment, and ask everyone to place their smartphones in there for the duration of our three hour course.  At the start of the semester, I had explained that I wanted to have the students attention as we have difficult subject matter to "translate" as, well, research for social workers, that's really sort of like "research as a second language." I explained that if people were awaiting important calls about, say, their partner's impending delivery of baby, or some such, it would be fine to let me know and keep the phone with them. After two years of what is WAY worse than the subtle clock-check, namely, the blue screen hue under the desk, I decided I was done.  Yes, I have read the reports suggesting that this generation of students learn through multi-tasking on their laptops and other devices.  I can even understand this as someone who cannot conduct data analyses in SPSS without certain music on my ipod headphones.  However, when the same students engaged in the smartphone checking et alia are the ones consistently doing less well in class, then it is time to act.

OK, so next week, the red basket is going around the room.  And then I drove home, and sat down to dinner with my husband.  We are trying a technology-free dinner time this week as we feel a little disconnected. No technology in sight.  The Blackberry and iphones are off.  The three laptops in our two-person home are powered down. The flat-screened television is all but a distant memory.  Even the radio is turned off.  And, to boot, our CD player is not working.  Even my ipod is out of juice.  Inhaling the soft aroma of the Gorgonzola gnocci and sipping a bit of Syrah, I watched as my husband added fresh lemon juice and olive oil to the arugula salad.  Ah, lovely, no technology, back to our roots.  And then it hit me.  It was something along the lines of "if you can't beat em, join em" but more of a compromise.  There will still be no classroom use of Twitter, but here's the plan.  Open to any and all criticism!  

Tonight, I am going to email my students (how passé, I know) and invite them to "follow" my professional twitter account (that's @eslayter for those already on Twitter).  I am going to send reminders about papers, links of interest to particular teams conducting research on particular topics,  articles related to the topic of the week, words of encouragement about getting through "research as a second language."  I still won't allow it in the classroom - but I am just going to see what happens.  Will they follow me?  Will they ignore me?  Will it facilitate engagement?  Will it spawn something I don't expect that might be of use?  We will see.  I will let you know.  I may even make a facebook page for the course as well.  You never know.  Follow me and see what happens.

Check out NPR's report on "rethinking how we teach the 'net generation'

Cartoon thanks to this website

As we hit mid-summer, perhaps it is time to begin thinking anew about the new academic year, and addressing what I call my "new school year resolutions."  Generally, this involves something along the lines of, work to be a better teacher, try something new.  Perhaps this year, you might choose to think about how to teach this new generation of students.  As I mentally emerged from a far-away vacation, this report brought me back to thinking about technology and social work education.  NPR has a new report out (from 7/14/2011) on how we teach what is being dubbed "the net generation."  For social work educators, for whom the client-social worker relationship becomes the student-social work educator relationship, we may need to come to terms with what, how and where that relationship exists - whether we like it or not.  While the primary interviewee in this article focuses on how lecturing is not as effective with the net generation, perhaps we don't have to throw the baby COMPLETELY out with the bathwater.  While I feel very uncomfortable with the laptops a-clicking in my classroom, feeling that people should be focusing on a tough topic with all of their attention, maybe there are aspects of my feelings that I should re-consider.  Time to challenge my thinking on this.  See what you think of this article, and enjoy discussing it - feel free to do so in the comments section below this post!

Rethinking How We Teach The 'Net Generation'

• July 14, 2011, 1:00 PM

Author Don Tapscott says it's time for universities to adjust to students digital habits — not the other way around. (iStockphoto.com) 

Few will argue about America's colleges and universities being critical to our economic and intellectual future. And by many measures, that future looks promising: Competition for places in the country's top schools is fiercer than ever, more families are willing to pay higher tuition, and employers are putting a greater premium on a college degree.
But Don Tapscott, co-author of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business And The World, argues that universities are woefully behind the times.

Tapscott — who has studied the digital revolution — tells NPR's Neal Conan that the traditional lecture model in American universities is no longer appropriate for a generation that has grown up making, changing and learning from digital communities.

Kids that have grown up collaborating ... walk into a university, and they're asked to sit there and passively listen to someone talking.

 

–Don Tapscott "My generation — the boomers — grew up watching 24 hours a week of TV per kid," Tapscott says. But, he adds, today's young people have had a very different experience.

"This new generation comes home and they turn on their computer and they're in three different windows and they've got three magazines open and they're listening to iTunes and they're texting with their friends," he says, "and they're doing their homework."

With such a networked approach to work and leisure time, Tapscott says the traditional university classroom is starting to feel less appropriate.

A Harvard student studying the corporate management expert Peter Drucker once summed up his disillusionment with what Tapscott calls the "broadcast model" of learning: "Why would I sit there and listen to a [teaching assistant] talking to 300 of us," Tapscott recalls him saying, "when I can go online and interact with a real-time Peter Drucker?"

"The big thing is to get an 'A' without having ever gone to the lecture," Tapscott says. "All these kids that have grown up collaborating and thinking differently walk into a university and they're asked to sit there and passively listen to someone talking."

He says that if someone from 100 years ago miraculously came back and found a modern engineer designing a bridge, it would be clear how much technology had changed things. But if that same person walked into a university lecture hall today, it would be entirely familiar.

"We need to move toward a collaborative model of learning that's student focused, [that's] highly customized and that is a model appropriate for a new generation that learns differently," says Tapscott. He warns that universities are ignoring the changing needs and desires of young people — and they're doing so at their own peril.

"When you have the cream of the crop of an entire generation thinking that the model of pedagogy is deeply flawed," he says, "well, the writing's on the wall."