As a supervisor of MA theses, I ensure that my students get familiar with various writing strategies, academic discourse, etc. However, I also recognise that these students – novice EFL (English as a Foreign Language) professionals – need learning opportunities in interaction with other members of our professional and disciplinary community.
I cater for this need with the use of Twitter. Thanks to this social medium, my students can learn from experienced professionals and researchers worldwide. What is more, they can be a meaningful contribution to the community: they can share what they learn as they read recent research literature for their proposed MA research projects. I introduce my students to Twitter in three phases, as part of my Research Writing Moodle course. Phase 1. I invite my students to consider the use of Twitter. First, they read this blog post about using Twitter as a teacher: 10 Tips for Teachers Using Twitter Having read the post, the students reflect on their thoughts and feelings. I ask them how ready they are to interact with the inter/national community of EFL teachers through this social medium. They respond in the Research Writers’ Forum on Moodle. Phase 2. The students reconsider the use of Twitter as teachers-researchers. They look at my Twitter profile and my posts to see how I use Twitter to interact with the inter/national community. I encourage them to explore some hashtags, such as #edtech, #onlineteaching, etc. I ask them to reflect on their thoughts and feelings at this stage. Has their perception of how they can interact with the EFL community changed? Again, they reflect on this in the Research Writers’ Forum. In their responses they can ask me anything they would like to know before they become Twitter users. Phase 3. This phase is optional. I ask my students to create or modify their Twitter accounts to be used for professional purposes. They are asked to follow 15 accounts of EFL researchers and educators, I also provide them a list of accounts in case they find it difficult to decide who to follow. Next, they post four tweets - one tweet per week - with a summary of an article they read for their MA thesis proposals and include a class hashtag. If you would like to know more about the use of Twitter in higher education, you can read this article: “Should We Ask Students to Tweet? Perceptions, Patterns, and Problems of Assigned Social Media Participation” by Daniel G. Krutka
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2020
Categories |