Guidelines for Teaching and Learning with Yammer
In October 2015, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dana Brinkel about her teaching practice as a Chemistry Lab Technologist and Instructor at Penn State Altoona.
In addition to her work as an instructor, Dana is also a student in the Learning, Design, and Technology M.Ed. program with Penn State World Campus. Dana’s analytical, informed, and light-hearted reflections on her experiences of using social media in her instruction made her an obvious choice for this interview.
In recent years, Dana has started to incorporate participatory Web 2.0 technologies in her instruction. She has experimented with using Yammer as a tool to facilitate peer-to-peer interaction, academic artifact curation, and engagement with a broader scientific community of practice.
I was thrilled with the quantity and quality of the insights, advice, and warnings that Dana had to share — our interview lasted nearly an hour! My greatest challenge in putting together this podcast was selecting and editing the content to give a concise summary of the conversation without doing a disservice to Dana’s thoughtful narrative.
Throughout our discussion, Dana touched on several important guidelines for teaching and learning with Web 2.0 tools:
- Encouraging students to explore current events in the Community of Practice of the chemistry discipline helps to bring concepts to life. Link big-picture theories with real-world applications, questions, and developments.
- Students may be hesitant to adopt social media or other Web 2.0 technologies for use in their learning. Setting guidelines, expectations, and structure can help to scaffold these tools in a way that makes them more approachable.
- Direct students to credible websites rich with resources and valid information. From there, students can pursue their own interests in the articles and stories they choose to summarize and comment on in their Yammer posts.
- In response to their peers’ posts, students can tap into more informal and creative resources to supplement the original article. This kind of collaborative knowledge building is reminiscent of practices that take place in the wiki sphere.
- Students create and establish their own norms and standards in the Community of Practice of their class. Students who don’t align with those norms may be pressured into regulating their behavior accordingly.
- Social media in learning gives students a chance to engage more actively in their learning, as well as to observe and imitate the writing and speaking practices of their peers.
- Failure to participate independently with Web 2.0 tools may not indicate a lack of interest on the part of students, but rather a lack of time. Even minimal use can be of value.
- When introducing new technologies in your instruction, share your ideas with others, get lots of feedback, and start small!