Social Media and the Classroom

From Forbes magazine – an instructor at Temple University talks about using social media in the classroom as a way of engaging students twice with the same material. While the article offers some great starting points and can provoke some useful discussion among the technophiles and curmudgeons, I think that Shapiro might have emphasizes more strongly the underlying point that harnessing these existing technologies means educating students about the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies.  He points to this explicitly when talking about Twitter, but changes to the traditional curriculum–such as hybrid or online courses–means asking students to think critically about their existing use of technology and meeting them at widely varying levels of familiarity and technological fluency.