Presentation for Guardian Higher Education 22nd September 2012: Using social media to enhance student experience

1. Students in the sandbox - social scaffolding for education Alan Cann School of Biological Sciences University of Leicester Find me here: bit.ly/AJCann

4. Personal Learning Environments

7. Facefeed?

8. Friendfeed

9. Engagement? 10 weeks, 134 students analyzed: 5,376 entries 8,151 comments 5,232 "likes” 199,853 words - average of 1,491 each, not including private messages ~15% of students continued to use the service more than one month after the end of assessment - considerable increase from other tools (<1%)

11. Females score higher marks than males (Wilcoxon rank sum test, p < 0.001). Although females make more contributions than males, males are strategically focused on assessment criteria.

12. gephi.org

14. Internalized group (purple)

16. Google+ is different Familiarity Integration

17. A work in progress Search not working (apart from people) No groups like Friendfeed Groups/Facebook pages - you can't join someone else's circle No tagging (yet)

18. Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen. Clay Shirky, 2008. www.slideshare.net/AJCann