Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Purdue University Lets Students Twitter and Facebook In Class
Share:
by Yuliya Talmazan | November 4, 2009 at 04:49 pm
58 views | 2 Recommendations | 1 comment
Purdue University in Indiana has launched an application called Hotseat that records what students Tweet, Facebook or text message in class, aggregating that content on a lecture screen for everyone in class to see. Students can engage with each other and their instructor by doing replies and voting each comment up or down.
Essentially, Hotseat rids students of the necessity to raise their hand in class, and lets them type in their thoughts instead. This way, a "backchannel" is created that lets the instructor see in real time what problems students might be having with material taught in class. On the other hand, professors have to be careful or any factual and grammar mistakes they make will be immediately corrected by students.
One of the classes is Personal Finance. The instructor, Sugato Chakravarty, said on the university's website that the heightened interactivity is a blessing, but may not appeal to all of his colleagues.
"The tool is called 'Hotseat,' and it does give students a lot of power," Chakravarty said. "In one class I mentioned the wrong president during the 1929 Depression and immediately about a dozen comments came in correcting me. I don't have a problem with students correcting me or challenging me; this shows the students are engaged. But not every professor may embrace this aspect."
On the other hand, the application can be potentially destructing. It can be hard to concentrate on lecture material and the "backchannel" at the same time, but many students browse Facebook and Twitter in class anyway, so instead of them wasting time looking at their friends’ profiles, why not turn that Facebook checking habit into something useful?
Purdue markets Hotseat as a framework for short responses for collective learning environement and enhanced student interaction. The software is currently in the test mode.
"We're not asking them to go to a new destination or use a new technology. We're letting them work on their studies from where they already live digitally," Bowen says. "Hotseat is also flexible enough that if there is a new social media tool that becomes popular we can add that, too."
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 17:21 on November 4th, 2009
Interesting experiment! Curious to see how it works. The downside: the annoying kid who always raise hand to talk about something completely irrelevant just won't shut up now..