Using Social Networking Tools for the Class

I attended the DELTA training session last week on “Web 2.0 – Uses in Teaching and Learning,” taught by Lee Ann Gillen, an MS program graduate. So now I am thinking about how we might use social networking tools as part of the class itself. Do we do a class Wiki or blog? Do we use Tweets and IMs and even Second Life such as Stephanie Trunzo is doing in her ENG 331 class? (See http://courses.ncsu.edu/eng331/lec/603/index.html.) Please send any examples of how instructors have used such tools in your other courses and any ideas you have about innovative ways to use them in our course.

ENG 583a Social Networking and Technical Communication

Hi. This blog is to help us design ENG 583a for the spring 2010 semester. In this entry I hope to lay out the basics for the course and then I hope that you will contribute with comments, suggestions, links, ideas for assignments, sites or sources that we should read, etc.

The course should be a combination of (1) studying how organizations are using social networking to complement or supplant their more traditional technical communication artifacts and (2) working on methods to use social networking to the greatest advantage to complement or replace more conventional technical communication genres. Number (1) should be relatively easy, but (2) will be more difficult. For example, does everybody do a product blog for some piece of freeware or shareware that has no documentation? Do we break up into teams and do wikis for such products? Simulating social networking tools/sites will be difficult, so I welcome your ideas for course projects and assignments.

We will read Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, and I welcome your ideas for other readings. While it would be nice if they specifically addressed social networking  and technical communication, we might be unable to find very much on the subject, so we might have to look at related issues, such as how organizations are using networking for other types of communication, including marketing, customer support, etc.

The course should be highly participatory. Each student should lead two (or more) class discussions, one on one of the major social networking tools (facebook my space, wikis, blogging tools, etc.) and one on a lesser known tool. Also, there will definitely be an assignment involving finding and reporting on an organization’s use of social networking for technical communication purposes.

One of the more interesting exercises will be defining exactly what is social networking (and what is not). For example, does the fact that Quicken now has a “Live Community” button make it a social networking tool? Is Web 2.0 the same thing as social networking? What about Web 3.0? We will spend some time in the first couple of weeks discussing such issues.

Those are my ideas so far. I could probably take all of this and put together a reasonably good course, but the whole point of social networking is for everyone to participate. So, please comment with ideas, suggestions, and improvements. With many heads combined we can most assuredly design an interesting, valuable course for all of us.