Effective Social Media Practices and Good Online Teaching

Follow on Twitter as @joshmkim

Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) writes, "I have this theory that if you are effective on social media then you stand a good chance of being effective in online teaching. How do these two activities go together?"

Two words: presence and community.

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The people who seem to get the most out of social media are those who dedicate themselves to being present on their platform of choice. Presence does not necessarily mean contribution. You can be present in the IHE community if you show up daily to read the articles and opinion pieces. You can also be present if you regularly provide your opinions in a comment, even if your commenting is on every 1-in-50 articles. The power of IHE is that we are a community that is informed by both a common set of interests, and a common pool of content. We are all reading, thinking about, and commenting on the same articles and opinion pieces.

On Twitter, being present means actively (on a daily basis), committing to interact with the platform. This may mean writing your own tweets, using Twitter to link to other things that you’ve read or seen on the Web, or simply using Twitter to filter what you consume. Presence on Twitter means that the people who follow you will reliably learn things from you. You build a community around the people you follow. We should always be suspicious of anyone who follows too many Twitter feeds, as above a certain number (maybe 500 follows at most), Twitter moves from a community to a promotional platform.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed (blog)