Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/55943
effective way to promote ongoing discussion and keep the subject matter fresh. As a business professor, you might not be comfortable "friending" your students on Facebook or "tweeting" ideas after hours, but it makes sense to jump in and experiment with these new media. Adapting them to your own class- room strategies might be easier than you think. The Me in Social Media "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet." —William Gibson Social media tools may seem peripheral to you, but they are already widely distributed to your students. One of the best books I've read on social media and how corpora- tions are learning to use it is Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Li and Bernoff write that organizations should follow the POST process: They should get the right people, define their objectives, create a strategy, and choose a technology—in that order. It's no different when a professor is choosing a tool to use in the classroom. The questions are simple: Who are my students? What is the learning objective? How can I meet that objective? Once you've answered these questions, you can choose the best technology to accomplish the objective you have in mind. Business professors often try to engage students in learn- ing objectives in one of four ways: discussion, collaboration, research, and community building. The following approaches can help profes- sors promote these activities effectively outside the classroom: Discussion — Most professors calculate student participation as part of the final grade. However, many students are reluctant to raise their hands, particu- larly if a course is not taught in their native languages or if their cultures discourage engaging with the professor. Blogging can be an excellent way to increase everyone's level of participa- tion, because it allows students to col- lect and process their thoughts before sharing them. Many blogging sites can help you easily create and manage a blog, including two of the most popu- lar, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. For example, my course on emerging 46 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010 markets has a one-week international travel component— this year we went to Malaysia and Singapore to compare and contrast the two markets. Instead of using a textbook to help students prepare, I posted current articles from The Econo- mist and the business press on a blog and had students com- ment on the articles and respond to other students' com- ments. Students also could post links to other articles that offered different perspectives. One student even posted links to entertaining videos on YouTube about how to experience Singaporean street cuisine. Just e-mailing articles to students or handing photocop- ies out in class does little to increase participation. Creat- ing and maintaining a blog, on the other hand, is a quick, effective way to promote ongoing discussion and keep the subject matter fresh. Collaboration — In qualitative business courses like organi- zational behavior, marketing, and international business, students often are placed into teams to research topics and present their findings to the rest of the class. In the past, students might have set up meetings to discuss the topic, exchanged notes, and prepared their presentations. But what if they were able to work together 24 hours a day through a collaborative wiki? Unlike blogs where people can comment on content but cannot change it, a wiki is a single online document or work- space where any team member can add to or edit the infor- Creating and maintaining a blog is a quick, LAURENCE MOUTON/PHOTOLIBRARY