 I use social media in all of my courses, whether they are online, whether they're face-to-face, whether they're hybrid. And I do this for one major reason. I want to turn what I do inside out. I want to turn my teaching inside out. I want to turn the students' expectations of what the class is about inside out. I want to show students that what's happening in our classroom is important, is dynamic, is of value to people outside the classroom. So I use social media to bring the outside world into my classroom and show what's going on. But I also use it as a way of taking my students' work and pushing it out to the world so that my students get out of the habit of thinking that what they produce is academic in the pejorative sense or is being written for an audience of one. How many times have we written an essay and we know that it's only the prof who's going to read it? How different we would write if we knew that there was an audience outside the classroom who would be critical or who would be receptive or who would be interested. And so I use social media to take my students' work, and of course I do this with permission, to push their work out to the audience that wants to find it. And it is amazing when a figure in the field will respond to a student who has written a reflection on an article that that person wrote. And that's happened in a number of classes and we start connecting students with these other scholars or other important lay people or individuals who just have an interest in it. And it really is transformative because the students start to feel that they are scholars, that what they are doing is authentic and worthwhile right from the get-go. I make sure that whatever I put on the social media is also listed in the, we've got Moodle or course link or whatever to use to communicate with the students. So I make sure that the information is available to them there. But the thing is with the social media, especially with Twitter, one of the things that some of the students might not get is some of the random conversations that I end up having with other students. And it's, I can't necessarily bring that over into the course website. So they might miss some of that, but I try to, for example, some of the students that are on Twitter, what they'll do is they will send me stuff on Twitter, hey, this is really cool, can we talk about this in class? And then I can bring that to class and present it to the students that haven't actually engaged on Twitter. But because there are certain things that I put on Twitter that aren't classroom, necessarily classroom materials such as job postings, events around town, all that sort of thing. More and more of the students are actually becoming engaged because they realize what use it might have to them. So bridging it is, you know, using Moodle, using course link, D2L, whatever system you have in place. But I am trying to pull them into it a little bit. I've always dabbled with social media in my courses. I used Facebook for a time, but I find that a little bit cumbersome now so I don't use that much anymore. I've used various instant messaging systems and now I simply use the chat system that's built into the learning management system on campus. I also use Twitter to talk about various things that I find interesting in chemistry and that seems to have gathered a following. There's several hundred followers. I've also used YouTube extensively. We have about 50 videos on various aspects of chemistry and that has several thousand subscribers and we're pushing three million downloads now. So my basic strategy for using social media has been with my entrepreneurship class and what I do is ask them to write a blog, create a blog, and then write reflective posts every single week on the stuff we're doing in class. And what I've found is, you know, I've been asked why don't you just use the tools within the course management system. And my response has always been twofold, one, the tool is not great, and two, it's a walled garden then. So you don't get a chance to expose your ideas to a much bigger audience. And so students are responding in an institutionally expected way because they're using an institutional tool. So I said, go create a WordPress blog or a blog or blog or something like that, send me the link, and then see what happens. And what was fascinating is, fourth year students were terrified to do this. I had this impression that writing a blog post or commenting on a YouTube video was so normal that everybody did it. And what I quickly learned was out of a class of 60, maybe four or five people had really any experience creating content other than the odd Facebook post and that sort of thing, but creating their own content and thinking about an audience other than the friends in their networks. And what was great about that was they wrote, their blog posts were so much better. They were in their own voice. They were focused on their own perspectives. And then people commented and they weren't people in the class. And I had one student who, the first year I did this said, was the last one to create her own blog. And I kept asking her, why? What's the big deal? And she said, I've never done this. I'm paranoid to write for an audience I don't know and this sort of thing. She ended up writing the best blog posts of the semester for sure. And each week she would be watching her stats and wondering, why are people visiting from Turkey? It was just a reality that I realized when we put everyone inside a course management system, we create an institutional system that doesn't actually mirror the way social media works or the way content works out in the real world. And for the students it was their first experience to get themselves out there and way more powerful. Now, of course, they wrote way more than they would have written within a course management system. So it was a lot more reading for me, but it was way more interesting reading. And I actually found their personalities came through and a lot of them are quite funny. And I don't think they would be funny in a course management system. Okay. So for instructors who aren't on Twitter or aren't using Twitter very much or on Facebook or whatever, if they want to incorporate that into their course, the first thing I would suggest that they do is learn the etiquette of Twitter. Understand that you're not selling something, you're communicating. If you get on there with the point of just throwing out info without actually engaging the students, you're wasting your time. It's not going to help. It's not going to be beneficial in any way. At least that's my opinion of it. Once you are on Twitter and you're using it, you want to have the conversation. You want to have communication with the students that's partly to do with the class but also talk to them as if they're real people. It will engage them. It will make them want to use it. The stuff that you have to be concerned about with Twitter is the fact that it's always on. So you may start getting tweets at two o'clock in the morning. I have computer science students, so my phone sometimes goes off at two in the morning if I've forgotten to set the settings to not disturb me. So it can be problematic. It is a constant engagement. And if you're okay with that or you set bounds on it, then I think it would be beneficial for the course. It would be beneficial for the students. It gives them a different way of contacting you in a way that's friendly, not necessarily terribly academic, because that might be a bit scary for them if it's always come to my office sort of setting. Think of it as just a nice, comfortable tool that you can work with to communicate with the students. And I think it would be helpful in that way.