I found one of the more interesting articles from this week’s reading to be Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A., & Kirk, D. (2014). Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice. A real sense from the reading (admittedly now 4 years old) is the state of infancy the education world is in using social media as a pedagogical tool.
In one sense, this means risks for an educator. Risks that you don’t have the skills. Risks that it might not be engaging. Risks that it might be popular but not educational sound.
But along with these risks comes opportunities to imagine and create a learning experience which it totally new.
I think an excellent example of someone taking a risk and delivering a social media learning experience was Oxford history graduate Allwin Collinson’s project @RealtimeWWII.
Over 6 years and 13.4 thousand tweets, he re-created the entire second world war through the lens of twitter. Photos, news announcements, quotes from letters (now tweets) The project has now concluded, but it is still fascinating to go for a little scroll through past comments. You can see the Tweet feed here:
https://twitter.com/realtimewwii/status/897927643814739969?lang=en
I actually heard Allwyn speaking at a conference in 2014 on this project, and it was a real pleasure to see both his excitement and growing popularity. I don’t have that speech, but i have found an even earlier video of him speaking about the project in 2013:
Ryan Taylor's Blog 
See, this right here is a beautiful, real example of how Web 2.0 tools can be used in education. Instead of bland, awkward textbook chapters and droll-as-can-be Ken Burns documentaries, this creates a fun, engaging, and stimulating way students can use contemporary tools to engage with history.
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