I will be presenting on the 2018 MLA Panel 314 titled “Blended Learning: Balancing Social Media and Face-to-Face Pedagogies.” The panel is sponsored by the HEP* Teaching as a Profession and will take place on Friday, January 5, 2018, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Chelsea Room, Sheraton.

My paper “Better Learning through Hashtags: Building Community and Improving Discussion with Twitter” will discuss productive ways to integrate Twitter into composition and English classroom practices; it will cover both general best practice guidelines and specific examples of successful activities, based on a case-study course taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016 and 2017. This presentation will argue that as a classroom tool, Twitter can be used to improve comprehension, expand peer-to-peer interaction, reinforce active learning, and introduce multimodal forms of class participation. Well-designed Twitter assignments and activities can expand students’ spheres of interaction beyond the physical classroom and into a digital social media environment. This presentation will discuss the potential of “livetweeting” as a framework for student active learning work that embraces the interactive and collaborative nature of Twitter as a social media platform.

My Powerpoint is available here: MLA2018_BetterLearningThroughHashtags