Using Social Media in the Classroom: I’m personally overwhelmed by media, so I’ve been slow to adopt social media. (Thinking about joining Twitter for this unconference…) On the other hand, I am using more and more interactive technologies (mostly web forms) in my teaching, and I find them very effective. I’d like to listen in on this conversation, hoping to see how it relates to things that have been working for me.

What Happened to “Humanities” in Digital Humanities? I’m a computer scientist interested in collaborating with humanists. I am actively seeking projects in which humanities professors and their students team with computer science professors and their students, to produce useful computational tools for exploring questions those humanists care about, with everyone contributing from their own areas of expertise. Having a professor or student with expertise in both fields obviously facilitates this kind of collaborative project, but I aim to show this isn’t a necessity.

Using ePortfolios in the Classroom: I’d like to hear what the state of the art in ePortfolios may be — what features they offer, what makes them effective, how flexible they may be. (We plan to use them primarily for program assessment at this point.)

I’ve used student blogs for years, but next year I’ll be teaching several sections of a first-year writing course on writing in/about social media–so my pedagogical experience will rather suddenly expand (explode?) into Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Storify, Digress.it, and all sorts of other tools and conversations with these students. I’m looking forward to hearing about other people’s experiences of teaching with social media.

We have a “Slave Narrative” project in my class, and my students are required to adopt a particular narrative for a group project and for a research subject. This year, many of them did the regular AV group project, but some of them did a facebook project where they established slave personas on Facebook, then interacted with other students’ Slave personas from the perspective of their slave. It was an interesting way for them to grow in knowledge of the history, sociology, and situational experience of those slaves.

So far, I’ve done the former with a Freshman Seminar (the topic was New Media), I have all my classes blogging in some form, with varying degrees of interaction with one another and with existing blogs as a kind of extended course reading, but never that last piece, like using Twitter as a backchannel for in-class questions. But then, I don’t ever teach classes larger than 25, and I’ve always thought of it as a means to manage larger groups.

Regardless of the specifics, I’d be interested in hearing about successful uses of social media in others’ classrooms.