Hello, my name is Melissa Glenn. I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at Broome Community College in Binghamton, NY. Broome Community College is a 2 year college within the State University of New York. Binghamton is just over the Pennsylvania line in upstate New York, a little less than an hour north of Scranton. I am originally from southeastern PA and received my B.S. and M.S. degrees from Penn State many years ago. Some of my colleagues have been experimenting with using blogs and facebook in their classes, but I have little experience with this myself. I teach both on campus and online courses, and am very interested in the best ways to integrate Web 2.0 tools in my courses. I do find that the students are always expecting more in terms of instructor use of these tools. For my course, one of the most used tools by the students are youtube videos from other anatomy and physiology instructors that help them learn the challenging content. Although I will be quite busy until the spring courses that I am teaching are completed in late May, I am looking forward to the course and discussing with all of you!
Emerging Learning Technologies
EdTec 467
The anonymity of the internet definitely causes some more forthright comments, definitely more negative comments. I typically have the students read a code of conduct for posting so that they remember that there are people on the other side of the screen. But that is for discussions within ANGEL. My husband manages a facebook page for his course, and he had one student post some very negative comments on facebook. The nice part is that the comments can be removed very easily!
Hello, Melissa! I’ve been wondering too about student expectations for social media. Personally, I’ve noticed that using online discussion boards has prompted me to be more forthcoming in my posts than I would be IRL. I’m assuming that it’s a result of the anonymity of the Internet and also simply that I’m comfortable conversing electronically, so I don’t feel weird about it like other people might.