The Method Is Not Sacred

I believe that education should be relevant and prepare learners for life out there (hopefully intelligent…). And technology is changing life on this planet at a very rapid pace. Many moons ago when I arrived at the shores of Stellenbosch University for my undergraduate studies, life and society was much different. I saw the new South African flag for the first time on a fellow Majuba resident’s T-shirt early in my first year (and instantly fell in love…). And cellphones was still limited to those brick-sized Nokias and the early movers who used them were labeled to be yuppies… And the internet? Never heard of. But five years later at the time of my departure from Stellenbosch’s green pastures, possessing a cellphone was not enough to stand out in the crowd and impress your neighbour anymore. And by that time, every student had their own univerisity email account and most were avid internet users.

Once at a training session for children’s church coordinators, it was said that “the message is sacred, but not the method”. In that context, the message of the gospel was and should always be sacred, but PLEASE move beyond puppetry and other old school methods to convey that message when today’s kids are used to the wide eyed “Full HD and Dolby Surround” experiences of PlayStation, DSTV, YouTube and the likes. I believe that this idea is partially true for all education, in that although the message might not be sacred, the methodology you use to teach should be relevant and exciting to your learners. And boy oh boy, how big is social media among today’s youth?!

But let’s get to the business end of this blog. The question again? (Sorry, got a bit zoned out like Walter Mitty…). How to incorporate or utilise social media in my curriculum specialisations, which are Economics, Accounting and Business Studies.

In all three subjects, I would request my learners to follow the Twitter debate on the government’s annual budget and make at least one posting themselves. The trending debate of this year’s budget happened at #Budget2016.

For Business Studies, I will assign each learner a certain business listed on the JSE whose publishing of its financial statements they must study online and post a comment on the company’s official Twitter account (and obviously also include a relevant hashtag for our class that I will provide).

I will make use of Twitter to conduct an informal group quiz test where both the questions and answers have to be posted on Twitter.

I will request my learners to write essays for Economics and Business Studies by means of blogging, and then tweeting their fellow learners with the links of their blogs and ask them to read at least one fellow learner’s blog and then tweeting a comment on it (same model as used for this module in Digital Pedagogy).

As an assignment, I will request my learners to create and post a YouTube video on any topic in the curriculum that interests them.

I will make use of Remind to send out uni-directional messages to my learners’ mobile phones. The nature of the messages would be, among others, to encourage them during exams, to send out links to noteworthy online newspaper articles, and to send important reminders.

The triple bottomline?
1) The method is NOT sacred!
2) Social media provides such a myriad of opportunities to bring excitement into my classes!
3)  Don’t be old school: make lemonade from the potential “lemon” of social media in your class!