Social Media in English Language Teaching

I am in the first week of the Electronic Village Social Media in English Language Teaching free, six-week, online course.  As part of our homework for the week we were to sign up for the various tools we’ll be using and compare them to each other and to a conventional LMS.  I have created a table comparing some of the tools.  I haven’t added information about the trio of 43 (Things, People and Places0 because I can’t figure out how they work.  I’ve posted a call for help on the EVO site, but haven’t received any intput yet.  What I have realized in comparing the tools is that all of the oneswe are using are asynchronous.  I wonder why that is.  Here is the chart so far.

Comparison of Social Media Tools 

Tool		Designer can Upload				Consumer can Upload
		Text	Image	Audio	Video	Text	Image	Audio	Video	ShareURL
Blogs	Blogger	x	x	x	x	x				x
	WordPress	x	x	x	x	x				x
Feeds	Bloglines	URLs								Of Blogroll
	GoogleReader									Of Blog post
	PageFlakes
Pix	Flickr
	VoiceThread	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
Nets	BigThink				x	x		x	x
	ChinSwing			x				x
	CommunityWalk		x	x
	Del.icio.us	URLs
	VoiceThread		x			x	x	x	x	x
	43 Places
	43 People
	43 Things

 New online tools appear everyday and existing tools continue to add new features.  In general, for example, BigThink seems to be a more sophisticated version of ChinSwing and Community walk seems to be a simplified version of GoogleMaps.  I don’t mean that these tools were developed from each other, but that they incorporate more or fewer features of the related type of tool. 

As far as how the tools in the chart compare to a learning management system such as Blackboard, it depends on which tools we are comparing.  Here are features of the version of BB that my university uses:

• Asynchronous discussion board
• Synchronous chat
• Uploading of audio and video files by both teacher and learner.

For me the biggest difference is that BB is a closed system whereas most of the tools in the chart can be public or have varying degrees of privacy.

 

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Tags: EVO08, SMiELT

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