Finding and Sharing Educational Resources using Twitter, Hashtags and Storify

This is the season for conferences. Immediately after MINA 2014 — 4th Mobile Creativity and Mobile Innovation Symposium in Auckland (where I discussed Phonar Nation), I attended an ascilite (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) conference at my home campus, the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. At ascilite 2014: Rhetoric and Reality, I delivered a presentation about Finding and Sharing Educational Resources using Twitter, Hashtags and Storify. Again, I recorded the audio using my iPhone, uploaded the file to Soundcloud and embedded it below, along with the slides, which I uploaded to SlideShare. You can play the audio while advancing through the slides without leaving this post. The paper has been published online as part of the conference proceedings.

Abstract

This paper reports on the use of Twitter, hashtags and Storify to connect with individuals inside and outside the university who have a shared interest in the future of libraries. The objective was to discover and share educational resources that were applicable to a class project, by engaging with experts through social media, rather than by searching for the resources directly. A related aim was to discover how even limited social contact with others could result in a more collaborative, networked approach to problem solving, in keeping with contemporary design practice. Over the 13-week course, 250 Twitter messages were collected, narrated and archived by the course Lecturer (and author), using Storify. During class discussions, students reported that the resources were useful, and they commented on the effectiveness of reaching out beyond the classroom in this way. This trial also provided insights into how such collaborations could be taken further.