The Big Draw - running a staff drawing event

Last week I was involved with planning and running a 'Big Draw' event for staff at the university one lunchtime. Along with some colleagues we planned a series of team games and activities to provide 'a new perspective on drawing'.

Games underway - everyone drawing

Inviting eight teams of 3 along to our creativity centre for an hour, they played a describing game, speed Pictionary and some doodle challenges. We also had some other non-competitive activities - the sign-in poster, drawastickman.com and a flipchart paper version of consequences.

The Creativity Centre - flexible learning space allows us to move the writeable walls
and projectors to design the playing areas as we wish

Although not convinced we actually lived up to the 'new perspectives' we promised the feedback was that people really enjoyed the session and definitely did some team bonding, as well as thinking about communication skills.

One of the big hits of the session - 'put yourself in the picture' sign-in poster

The winning doodle of 'Critical Thinking'

 For those interested, there is a fuller set of photos and description of the games on Facebook.

Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Using the quiz resource

See my post from last week: Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Developing a quiz resource for the background to this resource.

This week I used the ideas from the quiz in a lecture on 'Living a Digital Life'. The lecture included two cohorts of students, so I decided to select two questions from the quiz, and using PollEverywhere, present them projected side by side for each cohort. Here are the results:

Question 1: Do you have any online friends you have never met face to face? (Sort of means - Yes, but through a face to face friend, or similar)

This question is designed to get students thinking about how they value online relationships. Not a lot of difference between my cohorts here (note small sample sizes). Perhaps not surprising. 

Follow up discussion: If you do not have any online friends, do you think that such friendships are possible? Are they 'real' friendships?

Question 2: Do you ever feel like you are missing out because you have been offline for a long time? 

 
This question looks at how the students value the conversations online compared to the content they view. The 6 Digital Media students who answered 'Yes' for this one I would classify as the Digital Residents in the room.

Follow up discussion: Do you have to answer 'Yes' to be a Digital Resident? If being a resident with the option to choose when and where you connect a better model?

Finally here is a link to the original 4 question version of the 'Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor?' quiz. I've had 50 responses to this so far - although please note this has only been advertised via Twitter and Facebook so it is a highly biased and self-selecting sample, however it might give you a guide to the responses you might get among an adult room full of technology users!

Based on feedback to this four question version I am working on a longer more in-depth version - coming soon I promise!

Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Developing a quiz resource

When looking for resources to include in a session on living digitally this week, I wanted some kind of quiz to help students identify themselves on a spectrum. Not finding anything I decided to try and create a quiz around the Digital Visitor/Digital Identity model:

Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagementby David S. White and Alison Le Cornu.First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3171/3049

So here is my sample quiz - just four questions for now, taken from the ideas introduced in the paper, to start a discussion.

[if you are reading this anywhere other than my blog site then the embedded form might not work -  here is a direct link to the quiz]

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Once you've taken the quiz, please leave me a comment below to tell me how accurate you feel the results are? Did the questions offer responses you thought appropriate? What better questions could we use as well or instead?

I hope we can develop this into a useful resource to not only help students position themselves but also to help us all question our practices and understand the wide range of attitudes amongst our colleagues.

Making the first move. Do you follow your students on Twitter?

Having recently taken on some new undergraduate teaching, I've been thinking about my online behaviour with regard to students in comparison with my normal activity. I've decided, and feel free to argue with me, that I do not need to modify my behaviour - I aim to consistently act in a professional way. Whether networking with colleagues, students or complete strangers. I would always look up people I meet, and if they tweet, I follow them.

I'm going to talk about Twitter in this post - because the conversation about Facebook is more complex (it's a reciprocal relationship). Twitter is a public forum. If you tweet, anyone can read it. If I choose to follow you on twitter, that is my way of letting you know I am reading your tweets (but I could read them anyway by looking at your twitter page without you knowing if I wanted to). It's a one way thing.

The responses to my tweet were fairly consistent, here are a sample, they were also asked about responding to non-academic tweets from students:

Rachel on behalf of the British Library for Development Studies:

"We follow back if they follow us, but wouldn't follow them first generally. (And I don't follow any with my personal account.) Would always reply to genuine questions/comments I think, have never had any really irrelevant/personal ones! We do get to know some of our small student body quite well, but personal chats just don't happen through Twitter. So far."

Derek Moore, a teacher at Wits University, South Africa:

"IMO On Twitter it's fine to follow students as it's a networked public. FB is a walled garden & the request should come from them. I'd be cautious about non-uni/course type tweets, but would not exclude replies to specific questions."

Patrick Moore, teaching support at the University of Brighton, Hastings.

"I have a few that follow me, mostly used to ask tech questions. They found me, a couple of times it's been non uni stuff, but i try to keep it just for uni questions."

In all these examples, the student initiates the follow. Does that really matter? If you have a public profile online, student or staff, you should expect to be googled, and expect people to read it. Shouldn't you?

Any students reading this, what do you think? Would you think it odd if a lecturer started following your tweets/blog etc. Or would you be flattered?