43. Social media

Have you ever considered using social media in your courses but have fears of things going awry? Social media can provide rich opportunities for learning and public discourse. In this episode, Brian Moritz, an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Production and Online Journalism at SUNY Oswego, joins us to explore ways of using social media that engage students and discuss policies and procedures you can use to protect student privacy and provide a safe and supportive learning environment.

Transcript

John: Have you ever considered using social media in your courses but have fears of things going awry? Social media can provide rich opportunities for learning and public discourse. In this episode, we will explore ways of using social media that engage students and discuss policies and procedures you can use to protect student privacy and provide a safe and supportive learning environment.

[Music]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[Music]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Brian Moritz, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Production and Online Journalism at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Brian.

Brian: Thank you guys for having me.

John: Tody our teas are:

Brian: I have Earl Grey. Twinings Earl Grey.

Rebecca: Excellent. I’m going with my standard Twinings English afternoon tea.

John: …and mine is Irish breakfast from the same company.

Rebecca: It’s a Twinings afternoon.

Brian: You should get a sponsorship deal out of this.

John: I know. We should.

Rebecca: That hasn’t been the first time that’s been suggested.

We invited you here today to talk a little bit about using social media to enhance or augment learning. Can you talk a little bit about what social media platforms you think work best for learning and why?

Brian: Yeah, I think it’s a fascinating topic, one I’m really interested in… and I think… a couple different angles here… one, I think it really depends on your discipline and it really depends on the types of classes you’re teaching. I teach in our journalism and our broadcast units. They are very outward-facing… very naturally fit social media… something like Twitter. I’ll talk a lot about how I use Twitter in class… that’s a natural for me to use in my classes because that’s what our students are going to have to use when they get out in the job market. They’re going to be expected to have some kind of fluency in using Twitter and using social media as reporters… as media members. But, I think you can also broaden out our definition of social media. I mean it’s something I think we in Communication Studies think about a lot is “What is a social media platform? Is YouTube considered a social media platform? Is something like Medium or blogging software? How does that fit into the social media?”

It really does depend, I think, on the course material… on how you are going to be having your students using it. I tend to mostly use Twitter in terms of teaching for a couple of reasons: Number one… if you’re going into journalism… if you’re going into broadcasting… if you’re going into media… a presence on Twitter and use of Twitter is critical… for the profession… for starting out. Especially for my news writing classes or my journalism classes, Twitter is very newscentric and journalism-centric in a lot of ways. But, I tend to use that a lot. I’ve experimented with some of the other platforms in my skills classes. I’ve experimented with using Facebook a little bit… a little bit with Instagram and Snapchat. With those platforms, I try to let the students drive that because those are the most popular ones I found with my students.

Every semester I asked in these classes: “What social platforms are you on?” …just trying to figure out where our students are. What I found is very interesting. Most of them are on Facebook, but they don’t really use Facebook. That’s where their parents and grandparents are. They don’t want any part of that… and it’s also kind of the first one you start out at. I think you’re 13, allegedly, when you can legally start on Facebook, so that’s where you start but then you move off of it. Some of them are on Twitter; some of them are not. That kind of varies from year to year. But, the most popular ones are Snapchat and Instagram, and we talk about why that is… and we talk about how we can use those both personally and professionally… and a lot of times, how I choose to use the platforms is really trying to understand where media and where journalism are headed via the use of this platform. It’s not necessarily about using the specific platform (like tips for increasing your Twitter following or getting more likes on this Instagram story or whatever). It’s a lot more thinking how audience members are using these platforms to get news… and to follow what’s going on… and to react and interact with journalists… and what the students have to know and should know on a bigger picture level than just the actual skills involved with a specific platform.

Rebecca: It sounds to me like it’s really important for a faculty member to be aware of where the professionals in their discipline are. Because, whether or not it’s popular with students, if it’s popular with the professionals in the discipline that’s what we would want to train our students to go towards.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, absolutely with a caveat on that. Ithink it’s very important to know what actual skills journalists are going to use. Journalists don’t use Pinterest professionally on a wide scale. I’m not going to spend a lot of time thinking about introducing Pinterest into my courses just because that hasn’t taken off in my discipline the way it might let’s say…

Rebecca: …in design

Brian: …in design [LAUGHTER] …and in photography. Yeah… graphic design something like that, where you would probably really benefit much more from a Pinterest board and using Pinterest than using Twitter or anything like that. But I also do think it’s important. Our students are young, and again speaking from a journalistic point of view I don’t use Snapchat. I’m sure I have an account, but I’ve deleted the app several times. It’s inscrutable to me. I cannot figure that app out to save my life. But, my students are on that, and they’re using that, and I think it’s important for them to figure out “Okay, now, how are you gonna use this app?” This app isn’t necessarily widely used in journalism, especially at smaller papers, but a lot of that is because it’s old people like me who are in charge, and they may not get Snapchat and you, as students, you kind of intuitively get that… So, I tell them… it’s one of my big rah-rah speeches in my classes… but you get to design what this is gonna look like… what journalism on these platforms is going to look like… You know how you use it… and I think that’s empowering for students but also important for them to not just “This is what I need to get a job, but this is how I can build a portfolio and help create a new generation.

John: In terms of Snapchat, though, I would think that couldn’t work very well in this area, simply because of its ephemeral nature… that nothing there is kept very long.

Brian: That is true, but I do think one of the things that Snapchat has done… and there’s a whole other discussion on the economics and how long they’re gonna last, but if you go on the discover tab, where you will have media companies who will have Snapchat stories. ESPN is doing some really interesting things in the sports world, where they’re reinventing Sports Center. The 30-minute highlights show that a lot of us grew up watching is now reimagined as a two-minute Snapchat story on that discover tab. Well, that’s really interesting. How much do you watch that? What can you do on the platform like that? So, yes there’s definitely, I think in all social media, there’s always this balance of the ephemeral nature of it versus… and of course with something like Snapchat… where for listeners who don’t know, the content disappears as soon as it’s viewed or, I think, within 24 hours.

John: With some things, but even the stories, I think, are only kept for a limited period.

Brian: Right, and the same with Instagram. So, I was actually just reading a piece in the Nieman reports about how I believe it was the Cincinnati Enquirer is using Instagram stories and that’s really interesting. But again, that’s a new paradigm you’re bringing up… that it disappears after a while. it’s not like a story in the daily paper that you can read days on end. So it is interesting, and these are things that we have to think about when we’re using this as a pedagogical tool… the permanence of it… the empowerment of it… what the audience is for it… where it’s going… and I think this is what makes it both frustrating and exciting to teach the stuff and use this stuff. Because it’s not set in stone and it does change really quickly. I can remember live streaming… So, your Facebook live and before that before that Periscope, Meerkat (may it rest in peace)… a Twitter live video which is folded in with Periscope. When I started at Oswego, my first semester was fall of 2014, and live-streaming didn’t exist. Periscope and Meerkat, if they existed, they were like in private beta they weren’t out there. It was 2015 that they were first introduced at SXSW, and by April that year we’re figuring out how to get this into our curriculum and in our classes. It can move that fast.

John: Yeah. Before that, I think there was Livestream and Ustream. but Meerkat took over that whole market followed quickly by Periscope and others.

Brian: Right. When I say live stream I mean like the mobile live start where you can do it on your phone and immediately broadcast it out on Twitter or Facebook… whereas Ustream was a little bit more… I want to say… un-user friendly… but Facebook Live you literally click your screen twice and you’re there.

Rebecca: What about platforms that are a little more old-school for professional stuff like LinkedIn?

Brian: I don’t talk much about LinkedIn in my classes. I probably should, but I don’t. It is incredibly valuable for students to have as they’re entering the job market. LinkedIn is where you put your resume… it’s where you put links to your websites… and to your portfolios… and to the work you do… and you can create a really good network. I think it’s very valuable for job search. It’s very valuable for that. I don’t teach that as much [as] a skill to have in reporting and publishing. I guess I kind of focus a lot of my teaching on straight journalism practices and what you would do day-to-day in your job rather than the getting a job on LinkedIn I think most of our students… most of mine… anecdotally at least… they’re on LinkedIn, and they know they need to be on LinkedIn. They’re real professional place in their professional space.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some examples of how faculty can effectively use social media as a teaching tool?

Brian: Yeah… and again, it directly probably relates to the courses you’re teaching… your teaching outcomes… you’re learning outcomes… and the discipline that you are in. Somebody in organic chemistry is going to have a very different use case for social media than I am. The nature of what we do is different. But, I do think using social media as a tool can be effective for anybody going into a media profession, I think. It can be valuable for anything as a promotional tool. I can differentiate between writing courses and the more lecture courses that I teach, because they’re very different in terms of outcomes… in terms of what students have to do. In the skills-based courses, I have my students do a lot of stories… cover events… cover games… different things like that. Everything they write, every story they write, is published publicly online. We’ve used medium, which is a blogging platform. It’s a very simple, very straightforward WYSIWYG blogging program. Everything is published…not behind a password… not behind a protective thing… it’s online. One of the reasons we do that is we want our students to get used to “You’re a journalist. You’re a broadcaster. You’re in the media. You put your work out there.” That’s what we do… and I think that that’s valuable. I use social media as a way to: You publish a story… now you get used to you’d tweet out that link. It’s a basic journalism practice now… to get students in that habit… I write something I publish it I send it out to followers.

One thing that I do… I teach media law is one of my standing lecture classes which is not a skills course, unlike a lot of the other stuff I’m talking about, which is very skills based and hands-on experience. This is a traditional lecture law course. One thing that I do that I’ve found interesting, and with some success, is before an exam I will hold twitter office hours. What I do is… the night before the exam, let’s say the exam is on a Monday, and I tell the students this ahead of time. From 8:30 to 9:00 p.m., the night before the exam, I will be on Twitter. Everything else is closed… answer any and all questions you have about the coming exam… just rapid fire… fire away. Sometimes I have more questions than others, but there’s usually a pretty good collection of students asking questions… lurking (which means passively taking part in the conversation you’re watching it without taking part in it)… and I retweet every answer with a comment and they can follow along with a class hashtag so BRC 319 in this case. You can follow that even if you’re not on Twitter. You don’t have to follow me to do that. You can kind of watch at a distance. I found that to be incredibly useful. It’s 30 minutes and then, at the end of it, I send out five questions; three of them are actual questions so they can prepare one, and there’s two that are thrown in there and then at nine o’clock I say “Okay, the store is closed. Good luck on the exam tomorrow. No more questions.” I find that to be really useful and fun and helpful for students, I think. It’s not like a blackboard discussion forum where it’s so asynchronous that you can get lost in a thread… and when did I post this? …and you forget to go back to check it… or you don’t have alerts setup or something like that… because it’s a half hour, it’s more rapid paced. There’s a little bit of energy to it.

One of the important things I think the social media can do, is it can help connect with students in a better way and a little more personal way in an environment where maybe they’re a little more comfortable. We all have our loves and hates with Blackboard… but it is not the most inviting welcoming environment… I found at least; whereas Twitter, especially when you’re going back and forth with somebody, it can be it can be a little bit more personal, and that’s a fun cool way to use it in a class that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to using traditional social media.

Rebecca: Have you had people other than yourself chimed in to those conversations?

Brian: Alumni will check in and start either taunting me or taunting the students or like remembering past questions or something like that… and it’s usually very obvious that they’re having fun with the students and very obvious that they’re having fun with me. But, for the most part, it’s mostly the students who check in and there is a decent amount of engagement beyond just clicking into the actual social media aspect of it.

John: Have you had any cases where there have been people trolling the students in the class? and how do you deal with that?

Brian: That’s a really important question. It’s very important to say, in everything that I do with social media in a class, I am a straight cisgendered white male. I’ve got all the privilege. What I can do on social media is not the same experience that an LGBTQ person can do… or a person of color… or person from another minority group could be able to do… and I absolutely acknowledge that. I’ve had a limited experience with trolling, but it has happened. There was one time, speaking of a live-streaming… this was a few years ago and we were doing a unit in my online journalism course on Periscope. What I had the students do was get up out of class and go walk around campus using Periscope… basically just kind of wander around… get used to talking to your phone. This was a few years ago when students weren’t necessarily as naturally comfortable with it as they might be now… So, get used to the app… get used to how you can do it… get used to what you can do… you can watch different feeds on Periscope and so I was bouncing around… I went to one student… and normally they have like two people watching… three people watching… maybe they get up to six… and a young woman in my class had hundreds of people watching… and all of a sudden you can see the comments on the bottom of the screen… and I can start seeing comments come in about her and about her appearance… and it was typical gross online male behavior… and she shut it down… like she was interacting with them and she did not seem to be upset about it… she was kind of tossing it off as though whatever… and ignoring them and then she shut it down and then went away… and I’ve thought about that a lot… and that I didn’t react in a way that I should have reacted… which is then to jump in as the professor and say “This is a student… this is student doing an assignment. Knock it off. Stop it. This is inappropriate.”

If I see any trolling, I would report it to the social media platform. I made sure to talk with the student afterwards to make sure that she was okay… and she was… But, it’s something I think about… even reporting it. There’s a controversy going around on Twitter these days of what you report doesn’t necessarily get the person in trouble. There’s certain alt-right tweets now that are not polite society… I’ll tread lightly… but the person isn’t banned or doesn’t get in trouble for them… but I do think about it a lot. I think about it when I have a lot of young women in class or people of color in class. There are some ways that I’ve tried to scale back the use of social media in class… just in a way to limit any potential trolling and limit any potential negative impact that my students could come with. Because again, I think it can be really easy for someone of my status and my stature and the privilege that I bring to the classroom to think “Yeah, it’s important. You need to know Twitter… and the trolls… just ignore them” and blah blah blah blah blah blah. but it’s also important I think for us to recognize the dark side of Twitter… and the dark side of social media… and there’s plenty of dark side. That doesn’t negate its usefulness to students or its usefulness for pedagogy or a research community. But, I think it’s something we always need to be aware of and always ready to jump in. What it comes down to is keeping the students’ health and safety… and mental health… physical health… safety… well-being… all of that…number one. Everything else falls below that.

Rebecca: That raises some questions about privacy issues. Some students maybe already have a private Twitter account that they’re using and maybe have a persona established that your class assignment might not fit in with it. It could be a student who’s undocumented who really needs to protect themselves… or there’s a wide variety of circumstances. Maybe it’s personal safety. How do you handle those situations if you’re really focusing on social media as a way to communicate out and establish this larger community when we certainly know that there are people who need to be protected in those environments?

John: …abusive partners and so forth.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Brian: Absolutely… and that’s something, again, it has to be at the forefront when you think about these platforms. So, speaking kind of individually, and how I do it, they can create a Twitter account specifically for a class that they’re taking. So, it might be you know JohnSmith319 (the course is JLM 319) and that’s fine. I tell them you can create your own account for this site for this class. You don’t need to tell me your own personal Twitter account. It’s one of the reasons why I really only use Twitter… because it is easier to create a professional accounts on that… and it’s one thing that I’ve struggled with. Because, as I said earlier, I want them to think about using Instagram and using Snapchat as journalism tools. I think that’s really important for them. I think it’s really interesting for us as a news industry. I don’t want to follow them on in those platforms… and they don’t want me following them… and I don’t want that… like from privacy… just to don’t want your professor seeing what you’re up to and I don’t want to see that… and I do take that very seriously. So, it can come down to “Create your own accounts for this site.” I’m always open and I try to tell my students this and this conversation is making me realize I probably need to be more explicit about it. So, thank you for that. But, I do think it’s important to say “I don’t need to know any details, but if there’s a situation… domestic abuse… some sort of issue like that… obviously, don’t have to tell me you’re undocumented… but, if there’s something that’s going to prevent you from comfortably using your identity, I’m open to having a conversation and want to have a conversation with that.” ‘Cause at the end of the day, student safety is much more important than “Hey, you did this Twitter assignment well.” But, I do think that it’s important to navigate. it’s important to negotiate that. The online world can be a really scary place for people who don’t look like me, to be blunt.

Rebecca: I think the other challenge can also be maybe they’re comfortable telling you that they need to have a special circumstance set up, but then what did they tell the rest of the class, or how do you protect an identity to the rest of the class or that circumstance, when they’re involved in this really public discussion?

Brian: On Twitter, you can create lists, and I try to create lists of everyone’s Twitter handle on class, so that people can follow each other and interact with each other. But, if [a] person has a special instance that they need to create a more anonymous Twitter handle for class, that’ll just go on the list, no questions asked. I don’t bring it up. I don’t necessarily call them out on it. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve never had this come up, but it’s good to think about, and it’s good to kind of have in mind. The larger point would always be as a professor, and this gets in a wider pedagogy… the idea of flexibility and the idea that to be student safety student centric is first… and that’s got to be first and foremost in our decisions and in what we do… and I think there’s just some level of compassion and empathy that has to go into what we do in all these decisions… and I think social media and using it fits right into that.

Rebecca: I think sometimes our own privilege prevents us or blinds us from thinking through all the potential circumstances like you mentioned before. I know that the first time I really started thinking about this sort of thing was when a student didn’t want to publish basically a little biography assignment in my web design course. They didn’t want their information in a public realm like that and I hadn’t really considered that before. Well, what does it mean? Well, if you don’t make it live, then you don’t know how that process works. like how do I make sure that they can do all of those things?

Brian: So, what did you do in that situation?

Rebecca: I made a special circumstance. But what I do now, more so, is make sure that there’s a… not so much a policy, but it’s kind of a policy. I put in my syllabus… about being civil in the classroom… what that means… what the expectations are… and also bringing forward some of the issues that people might experience that people might not be aware of… and just putting that out there. A person might have this circumstance or that circumstance or this other circumstance and we need to protect everybody and we all need to have a safe place to learn. So, I write it in the syllabus and I also talk about it in a way that I never had done before.

Brian: I do think acknowledging it like that I think is such an important good dialogue to have with students. Because you’re right. It forces us as professors, but it also forces students, to confront their own privilege. That builds empathy… that builds understanding of “Oh, I see. I’ve never thought of it that way.” Well, of course you didn’t. Your experience is very different. But now we see the world through different lenses… and that’s good…and I think that that’s a really good way of looking at it and of thinking about these things.

Rebecca: Can you talk about a moment when you’ve used social media with your students where you’ve seen a big moment of learning? I was remembering some of what we had talked about previously about interacting with speakers who have come to campus or other things.

Brian: What I have seen is, I teach a sports writing course so I have a lot of guest speakers come in from the industry that I know from my career and it is always wonderful when you see a student after they come in several weeks later and they’re working on a story or they’re working on a final project or something like that, and they connect with a person that they had talked to. They came into the class, they tweet at them, or they ask them a question and there’s this connection and interaction. I do love seeing that because it shows they’re paying attention when they guest speaker was in, which is always a roll the dice, but it does show, I think, one of the things that benefits especially from a journalism standpoint that social media can do it’s that connection which is for the audience but with sources and so now I can get in touch with this person who writes for The New Yorker or who writes for ESPN even though I’m a college student at Oswego I can still do this, I can still connect with them. I’ve moved away from using Twitter a lot that’s more auxiliary than central in the course. One of the assignments that I have my students do in my online journalism course is a social media scavenger hunt. I give them a list of eight to ten things and they have to create a story only on social media. It started on Twitter, I’m branching that out because it’s a much more visual story so it can be an Instagram thing. But I had one student, and it’s my first year teaching it, and it’s a Tuesday Thursday class, so what are they an hour 15, an hour 20? They have to complete this whole 10 item checklist in an hour 20 which is quite a deal because you got to go to the lake, go across campus and do all this stuff, it’s a big thing. What the student did was, and I still hold this up as the standard, they didn’t just go through and get a photo of this, photo of a student, photo of a professor, photo of the lake, photo of academic excellence, or whatever. He actually thought through and crafted together an entire narrative to the whole story and so when he presented it later it wasn’t just this collection of individual tweets structured on those shot sheets, he had told a story about it. I found that to be just really enlightening, wonderful for me, but enlightening because I hadn’t thought of it even in the way that he did. So it was wonderful to see a student take this and create an actual story and use this as a storytelling medium.

John: One of the things we often encourage faculty to do is to use social media to develop personal learning networks where we encourage people to follow influential people in the disciplines on Twitter or on Medium, or on their blogs, or other sources, and I would think in journalism, as you’ve mentioned, that could be really useful. Might that be more generally applicable though across many disciplines?

Brian: Oh I will defer to you guys on the other disciplines. But I do see that coming from a conference, I was just at the AAMC conference in Washington, and that includes journalism broadcast and communication studies and a whole lot of different disciplines. I do see incredible value in that from a scholarly perspective, so it’s not just more journalists weeding out the news or tweeting out reaction to what Trump said or something like that. We’re talking about when you have a network, and I’ve been lucky. I’ve developed a lot of friends who study online news, online journalism, sports communication, and from a scholarly perspective. What’s really great is you see reaction to news events from that scholarly perspective in real-time in social media. So it’s not just this thing happened and reacting to it now we can kind of understand it from a framing Theory perspective, from a uses and gratification point of view, or a sociology of news this is why it happens. And I do think it is incredibly important and useful for faculty in all disciplines. You can use social media to connect, to see what people are working on. There’s a movement about more public scholarship, more open scholarship, in progress scholarship, what you’re working on now. It does help me stay on top of the field a little bit and keep current a little bit instead of waiting for the next journal to come out every two months, or something else to see what people are talking about; it informs my current research. I’ve lost track of the number of study ideas that have come about because somebody says something on Twitter, somebody responds, I respond, and we go back and forth for like five minutes. Somebody says we should do a study on this, and we’re like, yeah let’s do it. And you connect and sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn’t work out, but I think that can be incredibly useful and I’m sure across disciplines you can still do that where you’re talking to people and it’s kind of like, at its best, then we’ve talked a lot about social media at its worst. But at its best, it can be like that hotel lobby at the conference, after everyone’s done and everyone’s kind of hanging around talking, and it’s the social hour. But now you have this, without having to spend your travel budget. You can do it you can keep up and talk through ideas and see what people are working on.

John: One of the things I’ve seen the last four or five years, is that a lot of conferences will have apps where for each session they’ll have not just a conference hashtag but they’ll also embed the specific session so that people can see in real time what’s happening in other sessions. I’ve been at sessions where I heard about something really cool happening another session where I’ve just snuck out the back and walked into another session because sounded much more interesting. You can’t always tell from this short abstract to what’s going to happen in a session and that ability to see in real time what’s going on, and to share that globally, where once you get access to that you can then see who the presenters were. Generally more and more conferences will have the Twitter usernames of the people who are presenting and then you can send them a tweet or contact them through email and ask for copies of the papers, so it does give you a lot more options for connections.

Rebecca: I was going to say, it’s really interesting that a lot of those conversations happen in private before right but now it’s public discourse that’s happening. And so it’s interesting to me to expose our students to that and invite our students into those conversations that we’re having with our colleagues so that they’re not just having conversations with us or their faculty at the particular institution that they’re at, but now they’re having conversations with faculty at multiple institutions and scholars or practitioners in the field which I think it can be really powerful especially if those individuals are willing to engage with your students as well.

Brian: Right. And John, getting at your point, the conference I was at I was had a session yesterday, and it was a panel discussion and I streamed it on my Facebook page, I should have done it on Twitter to get a bigger audience but I did it on Facebook. It was specifically requested, I had friends of mine from other institutions who weren’t at the conference, who knew this panel was going on, and say would somebody stream it? And I did. I think that’s incredibly useful especially at the conference set up because we’ve all been to conferences and they’re great and they’re fun but how many times does it feel like, to you guys, that the research presented just dies in the room? Not in a bad way, but like you present and you have a discussion, but doesn’t always travel beyond those walls or it doesn’t have an audience beyond who’s in the room. And whether you’re streaming it through a live stream or you somebody’s live tweeting it using a conference hashtag, something like that. I think that especially when we look at the rising travel costs and rising conference costs, and Rebecca, you make a great point about bringing our students into these discussions as well. They get experience they get to see the work we’re doing as scholars and they get introduced to these ideas, again this is social media at its best. That democratization of information that’s not just, hey I got accepted to this conference and I have the travel budget, I can go and hear these big ideas, now everybody can hear those big ideas and build on them.

Rebecca: Such as the democracy of ideas, either it’s providing this access or a secret handshake into the community, if it’s a discipline that you don’t know that much about or how to get into it, platforms like this can allow a doorway in for someone who might not otherwise have access.

John: And this isn’t just restricted to traditional research. I have several musician friends who when they’re in the process of writing in new songs will sometimes livestream a recording of it and get some feedback from people immediately which you wouldn’t hear otherwise until they released the final product a year or two later often, it can be a lot of fun.

Rebecca: How do you see social media use in the classroom impacting the relationship between students and faculty?

Brian: That’s a really interesting question and a really good one. Again, I come at this like most straight white cisgender male. I have seen really nothing but positive impact on it. I think it helps when you’re active on social media, now it should say, my Twitter is much more professional place, so I do a lot more journalism, a lot more sports talk stuff there, so my students follow me, I follow my students, especially for class and that happens. The other platforms, Instagram and Facebook, I do not friend students. If students friend me and I know them from several classes, and especially if they’re juniors or seniors, sometimes I will friend them while they are still in school after they graduate it will go back and forth. I never friend a student, I never send a friend request to a student on Facebook or Instagram. I think that’s crossing a line that I’m not comfortable crossing and I don’t think they would be comfortable crossing as well. But I do think not just being on social media but being active and being willing to have a conversation with students, this is very similar to the ideas that were in the small teaching book from last year. The five minutes before class, where you talk to students about the weekend or about the movies that are out or music or the game over the weekend or whatever and just make them comfortable, get them in a setting for learning I think that that extends well on social media. And I think that I’ve been lucky with the students I’ve had, but I also do feel like it does help build that connection and build that rapport with them. I’ll post pictures a decent amount of stuff about my daughter on Twitter. I do that because I’m that annoying proud dad who thinks his daughter is amazing and weeds out stuff about her all the time. But I also do think I’ve thought about this professionally and I think it is important, I teach a sports writing class, that’s a lot of guys in that class that’s a lot of men in that class and I do think it’s important that they see a man who’s into sports who loves sports a lot of these traditional masculine ideals, playing with his daughter talking about musical theater, talking about these non sports things, I feel like that’s an important part of what I can bring to the table and I think that can help build relationships and show students that just because you’re into sports doesn’t mean you have to absorb this toxic masculinity that we see in sports a lot. I have developed good relationships with students through Twitter and then that carries over. I will say, I haven’t thought about this you analytically, but I do believe the students that I get along with well on social media are the ones I get along with well in person. I don’t know, there’s not a lot of the online disinhibition effect, where students are gun shy is class but are outspoken on social media, but if you allow yourself to be active and be open on social media, it doesn’t have to be all personal stuff either, you don’t have to post pictures of your kid. But if you post pictures, post the stuff you’re working on or the stuff you’re interested in. I think that that’s just a natural bridge to students. Anything that helps them see us as people and not as this professor-type person in front of the room was in charge of their grades, but we’re people as well. That’s what creates a good relationship. I think used properly, always the caveat, but used properly, I think social media can help do that.

Rebecca: It’s kind of interesting over the last few episodes that theme has bubbled up unintentionally; the idea of demonstrating your humanness as a faculty member in a wide variety of contexts, but that students are able to learn better when they can see you as a person, and you’re a person that makes mistakes, that you experiment etc., and you also learn.

Brian: Right, exactly. There’s a certain transparency to it too. I’m not hiding behind the curtain of what I’m doing, this is what we’re working on, this is what we’re gonna be talking about in class today, get ready for it. Or something like that.

John: Do you want to talk a little bit about the meme war?

Rebecca: I was surprised that when we asked what you do in your classes you skipped over it you didn’t mention it.

Brian: You save something for the end of the podcast, I figured. The meme war is an all credit to this idea goes to my good friend, Dr. Nick Koberstein, who teaches at Keuka College in the Finger Lakes. Our kids were Montessori classmates, that’s how we got to know each other, and we follow each other on Twitter. I saw him doing this and I thought it was a really fun idea and so I co-opted it myself. If you go to Twitter and search for Moritz meme war you will see this. So, it starts from the premise of by the last week of the semester everyone’s kind of miserable, right? Especially, I found the fall semester, there’s no real break. Like November’s just a slog, you get the Thanksgiving and then you come back and there’s like a week before classes, the weather’s starting to turn and Christmas is in sight but it’s just that time of semester where everyone’s ready to end it, and so I always tell my students, okay so what’s your motivation level right, what’s your confidence level how you feelin, and everyone’s kind of like what’s your stress level? Everyone’s like, 14 a scale of 10, and so I introduced this Moritz meme war it’s just the thing I do on Twitter to have fun. The rules of Moritz meme war are, they have one week the last week of classes, in each semester, and they have to post two memes to Twitter with Moritz meme war. One of them has to be at least somewhat tangentially related to the course material ideally, it is something straight out of the course, but there’s a lot of leeway. The other one is wild card, literally that’s all I tell them, wild card. And they have to post two memes to Twitter with that hashtag. And again, they can use a professional account, they don’t have to use a personal account. If they’re not on Twitter and don’t want to do it they can email it to me and I will post them with the hashtag as well so it breaks that barrier if you’re not involved with it. Any student who does that gets three points on their lowest grade at the semester. That’s the carrot at the end of the stick; you post it you get three points. I do this across all three of my classes. The one tweet that gets the most engagement; the most retweets, the most likes, that person gets five points on it, to kind of encourage a little more creativity and give it a little more stakes. You can look at it, I mean it is a lot of fun. They use that wild card too, I think as the kids would say, drag me a little bit. There’s a lot of mocking my love of the Avett Brothers on there. Apparently I talk about them a lot and they mention that. They bring up verbal tics I have in class that I didn’t realize I have or I didn’t realize that they noticed or something like that. At the end of the day it’s really something just to ease the tension, like it’s that last week, it’s finals, everyone is stressed out. Hey, you get an extra credit and you get to have a little fun on it. And Nick and I, Dr. Koberstein, the creator of meme wars, we actually presented a paper on this at the Blended Learning Conference at Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, from our College, earlier this year, back in May and we talked about it, we’re actually considering writing a journal article about it. The kind of hook on it, and I did hear at the conference I was just at, about some research about this, that 10-week,10 to 12 week part of the semester, there is a noticeable drop in student engagement, in student motivations. I think Nick called it the third quarter drop off. Or, like, you’re excited at the beginning, you kind of plateau, and then you get around like the middle of November in the fog or with craters like that and so this is a way to combat that. We can overthink it a lot, again it’s a way to have a little bit of fun, it’s a way to engage with them, it’s a way to let them have some fun. They’ve been with me 14 weeks at this point you can have some fun with it. And one of the interesting things that I found on this, is I did it in one of my classes, you know, it’s just one of those classes that was really kind of quiet. We’ve all had that right? For some reason there wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth in the class. It was a quiet group. It was frustrating to me. We did the meme war and that class just took to that like a duck to water. I mean they were all over it. And so what I started thinking of is that in a way this presented this idea of latent engagement, which is a term I just made up. they were into the course they were just quiet or there wasn’t that one or two students who brought the class out of its shell and led them in discussion, but they were super into the material and I found that to be an interesting thing and again, we get back to this idea of privilege. I don’t know if a woman of color could do a meme war in class where they invite students to have a wild card, that’s just asking for trouble that straight white guy, me, doesn’t have to think about, and I acknowledge that. But it has been fun and not only do I have current students doing that but alumni will chime in, where was this when I was taking the course? Oh, can we have an alumni division on it? And they’ll post and my friends will get in on the act as well. Having them see me as a person and having that freedom to engage and freedom to talk about things, and then it’s not just very serious course material. This might be self serving on my part, I like to think it’s a good recognition on my part that, hey, this is a really stressful time for you guys, and I see that and I understand that, and yes, you still have your project to do and I’m not compromising on the work you have to do or on your deadline on this but, hey, I see that this is a hell week for you guys and that you’re probably not sleeping a lot ,and that you’re probably not eating well, or probably not exercising, you’re at your breaking point, let’s throw a little fun at this part of the semester.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up our podcast by asking, what are you gonna do next?

Brian: What am I going to do next? Why I should probably get started on my syllabi for the Fall since the semester is starting. In general, what I’m doing next is, research wise, I’m very interested in the website, The Athletic, which is a sports news website, which is an only subscription model; no advertising on it, and there’s no free access, you have to pay to read stories on that and so I’m working on several studies with that. In terms of looking at social media, I am very interested in what Instagram is going to become and turned into as a social platform. It was bought by Facebook several years ago so it’s copying a lot of what snapchat does and doing a lot of that. But the use of the story feature and Instagram, the use of this very visual medium, and it again, kind of getting back to what we were talking about at the start, it’s where our students and our recent graduates are. That’s the social media that they’re using. In news and in journalism we talk and think a lot about Twitter. Only about 20% of the internet population in the u.s. is on Twitter. It’s an incredibly small number when you compare it to other social media, and I just think, for me, where social media is going is what you see with our students when we talked about this earlier the “ephemeralness” of it, the visual nature of it. I’m fascinated with seeing what Instagram is becoming, how news organizations are using it, how students are using it. Are they using it to get news and to get information? I’m really interested in seeing and developing using Instagram more for news and seeing what can be done with that platform.

Rebecca: Well thank you. We’re glad that you’re able to join us to talk social media.

Brian: Thank you guys for having me this was fantastic.

John: Oh thank you. One other thing I’d like to add, as an addendum is, in terms of keeping up with professional development things, we do have the Oswego CELT Twitter feed which is good for keeping track of our releases of podcasts as well as providing live streams for most of our workshops.

Brian: Mm-hmm I’ve watched a few of them through your Twitter feed.

Rebecca: At least we have an audience of one. [Laughter]

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Theme music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance from Nicky Radford.