Presentations by Matthew Homewood, NLS, and Neetu Chetty (Varsity College, South Africa). Matthew up first, on ‘Extending learning spaces using social media’. He’s been collecting prizes by the armful recently, and he compared the situation re digital tech and legal education to the situation with initial teacher resistance to calculators in school classrooms. Interesting. He took the example of a large undergrad module in EU law, lots of student queries, how could he respond? He considered Twitter. A 30 min interactive Twitter session, ask me anything EU law related, #EUlawrocks hashtag. Secure, familiar platform, extensively used and free, that gave individual and cohort feedback. It gave Matthew opportunities to identify trends, too. Worked really well. Limitations of 140 characters? He didn’t think there was an issue, nor was there a ‘floodgates’ issue re the tweets. Intense learning session with students, who enjoyed the session.
Second approach – using technology for an EU study group. Matthew used Yammer, MS social media platform, used as a space for students to interact re the module, with Matthew sitting in the background, as it were. It worked well with a student champion. Matthew tried it without a student champion and found that it didn’t work nearly as well. 504 interactions, 131 likes. Good session, showing what can be done with free software.
I had to leave the next paper quickly, to prepare for my session, didn’t quite catch it all, so won’t try to liveblog it.