Sunday, March 20, 2011

rey junco

his talk at sxsw - using twitter to improve college student engagement
started saying.. 
i'm just going to go with the wisdom of the crowd, nice..

pos:
time spent on facebook, 4th strongest neg predictor of engagement, but what they were doing was more strongly related
time spent on fb neg, but time related checking things on fb not neg at all

all studies have been correlational and don't let us determine causality

could be that less engaged students spend more time on fb

what you want to do is have some controls

why twitter
needed to find a group that wasn't using tech

twitter penetration hasn't been as heavy as fb, but with faculty, more have been more into integrating twitter
too much drama on fb



does twitter have an affect on engagement?
does twitter have an affect on 1st sem grades?
control group used ning, other used twitter (one twitter account and followed each other - how is that twitter? - aren't you missing the others out there? - i guess i don't understand.)
sent out class reminders, which led to study groups
students pulled profs in more than on ning - positive feedback loop

Rey is a quantitative researcher

end of semester - findings
engagement - twitter group more engaged
twitter kids kept talking to the profs, the students on ning didn't

the research part was a huge time commitment, calling on the api daily to get the data
but much more efficient, ie: to get these results would have had to spend much more face time

grades - the twitter group had significantly higher gpa's by half point, very robust, randomized at the level of the section, if would have done it at level of student.. would have been higher

left alone, does student use of twitter have affect on engagement, so tried in large lecture course - did a hashtag and projected it up on the screen, but didn't bring attention to it, let them self-select if they wanted to used twitter or not, no encouragement as to how to use it
same design, some using, some not, ended up 50/50.
no results yet
no control
results:
usage is not usage
how much time do you spend studying? what are you doing when you are studying?
time is not time
on the surface, looked like they were getting into course content, there was no affect

engagement clearly is important, the connections/modeling/using it from profs is important
if you leave students to their own devices, they'll use twitter and other soc devices, they'll use it for lots of things
but if you coop with them, you can focus success toward engagement and grades

important to engage with students. ed is a relationship
(so weren't those results more about the size of the class and the original relationships before twitter)

in study #1 - one student posted tweet on wanting to harm self, other, that didn't know them tweeted back, had a convo in public, got the profs to notice and bring student in to talk to

instructional prompts were same between ning and twitter group, twitter was crazy into it
all this costs so much. crazy.

what is it about the students that picked up on the twitter thing..
(weren't they already in a closer knit setting?)

2nd group was open, other wasn't
1st group all freshman, 2nd group fresh and soph

Rey hopes what comes out of his work - kids using communities that go beyond college

lms (learning management system) rant... static systems, incredibly non-engaging
the magic and fun happens with comments in a blog post, and twitter and facebook

doing research on fb is really hard?.. how so

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