CPD: Creativity and Critical Thinking in Higher Education - Week 2 Activities

WEEK 2: ACTIVITIES

PART 1. Choose one tool from http://tiny.cc/socialmedianews and to discuss how it could be used to promote creative or critical thinking with my students.

The tool I choose is Delicious, which is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It would be very useful for my teaching to add my module Reading Lists to Delicious, particularly for those modules where the majority of references are to online materials, using unique tags. Then for each main topic I cover in the module to get the students in groups to augment the Reading List with relevant online materials. Each group could be required to review the materials that other groups produce using an appropriate rubric that would consider the overall academic qualities of the material, and then only the top rated links would be included in a final resource list.

PART 2. Also we are to look at http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=06842a45ed8344acb4584dbe1b297367 and to comment on it as another way to think about social media.

I hadn't really thought much about the "Guidelines and Policies" element of social media, I found the policy guidelines released by the Canadian Government for the public service use of Web 2.0 to be very interesting. Even on employees on personal sites, they are required to remember that: 

• Public servants owe a duty of loyalty to the Government of Canada;
• Do no harm to the reputation of your employer;
• Maintain integrity and impartiality; and
• Uphold the tradition of political neutrality of the Public Service.

I also like Reynol Junco's "The Need for Student Social Media Policies", which contains a nice definition of cyberbullying "Cyberbullying is when someone purposely embarrasses, harasses, or torments another using digital media." which makes me reflect on a newspaper article I was reading where they said some students felt cyberbullied if they posted their status  online and no one commented on it or "liked" it (if they felt it was being done in a deliberate boycotting fashion) which is covered by "purposely embarrasses", I think.