OK, so I finally created this blog in midwinter, but did not follow up. In mid-March, we got a peptalk for the e-Institute -- the main way we sort out how we can use potential social media tools in our teaching is to USE them (kinda obvious, but it was helpful to have that as a kick in the butt). I thought I'd get right back here and post on my experience with the Wikipedia project in my conservation course, but that will still wait for another day. I'm instead thinking about the trying on thing, and on what motivates us to try.
I am sitting in on a graduate seminar on communicating science via the media, led by Liz Neeley of COMPASS (who is awesome, by the way). Lots of the lessons can come in handy for communication beyond the media too. Anyway, she is requiring all the students to use twitter, which prior to the course, I'd done quite minimally (I think I had 6 tweets). We were supposed to be using twitter for this institute, but I've always felt twitter is too ephemeral. But in the context of helping with the course, I've started to use it. And I am starting to get something of how it COULD be used... How 'bout that?? I am learning by trying it out!
So that gets me into thinking about motivation. What got me over the hump was somewhat my guilt here on not being a good partner to my colleagues (or self), but more, helping in a class setting -- that is, helping students. I think I need to have the motivation of using a technique SOON in a class to get me trying this stuff out.
Well, that is something to recognize, but what I think I need to recognize even more is that experimentation is needed way before getting to the "about to use in a course" stage. So I have to figure out how to do this needed exploration.
Either way, I'm glad I have found some motivation to start trying stuff out - and hereby hope to make a better practice of trying stuff on!
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