Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/337193
56 July/August 2014 BizEd technology FARAKOS/TH I N KSTOCK technology DOES USE OF social media in the classroom detract from student engagement? Faculty at Audencia Nantes School of Management in France assert that use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Scoop.it actually increases student engagement with content. In one course, a professor used Twitter to encourage class interaction during student team presentations— while other team members presented, one monitored tweets with a chosen hashtag that included questions and comments from the rest of the class. Of the 80 students in the course, 95 percent reported that the flow of tweets between the presenters and class made discussion more dynamic. One hundred and twenty students in Audencia's man- agement, organization, and law courses have been using the free Internet publishing platform Scoop.it to post arti- cles, videos, and other relevant content. Some also chose a single company to study and then created a "wall" on Scoop.it where they posted their insights. Although only 2 percent of these students noted they were familiar with Audencia students created this digital content wall on Scoop.it to support their analysis of how Yahoo's leaders are managing change. Audencia students created this digital content wall Scoop.it before the class, 84 percent said they preferred the use of this digital approach to facilitating course con- versation over more traditional measures. Audencia faculty are exploring ways to use digital sharing tools more expansively to support a wider range of content-sharing among students and faculty. The school is in discussion with Blackboard to see if it can provide this kind of system. Administrators also are considering developing an internal solution. Social Media Boosts Student Engagement TWO STUDENTS AT the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology in Cambridge have raised more than US$500,000 for an unusual project. This fall, they plan to give $100 in bitcoin—digital- only currency that supports peer-to-peer payments without need for a central bank—to all 4,528 under- graduate MIT students. The goal is to create an ecosystem for digital currency at MIT, say Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying com- puter science, and Dan Elitzer, founder and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club and a first-year MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The pair hopes that the MIT Bitcoin Project will inspire academics across campus to study how students use their bitcoin and how the currency might spark academic and entrepreneurial activity—establishing MIT as a global hub for bitcoin- related research. Bitcoin Comes to MIT "Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with Internet access at the dawn of the Internet era," says Rubin. The project was funded largely by alumni and rep- resentatives of the bitcoin community. In addition to providing bitcoin to students, the funding supports infra- structure and informational activities related to the initia- tive. These have included helping campus merchants set up to accept bitcoin payments and sponsoring an event in May that featured presentations and workshops on the bitcoin phenomenon. Rubin and Elitzer also are collabo- rating with MIT's Big Data Living Lab to seek approval from the Institutional Review Board to use human sub- jects for studies of bitcoin use, including allowing stu- dents to opt in to the virtual currency experiment. To read more about MIT's bitcoin club and project, visit bitcoin.mit.edu/.