Six Ways to Use Social Media in Education

Repost of a blog post from Lynne O Brien, Ph.D., Director of Academic Technology and Instructional Services for Perkins Library at Duke University.

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Faculty and students routinely use Facebook, Twitter and other social media in their personal lives, so how might those same tools be put to academic use? Here are some uses of social media for teaching and learning that I’ve been following.

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iPad apps: For viewing/displaying video clips

I work with a lot of video (film, tv, commercials, remixes, etc.), and one of the biggest frustrations for me when I started using the iPad was that my large collection of video clips were not compatible with the included iPad video app. The native bundled video app simply doesn't play well with many standard codecs such as xvid or divx. Even formats that work fine on my iPod Touch do not play--even some of my .mov files!

I use video in teaching, research, and presenting on a variety of topics, such as fan studies, queer studies, video editing, "deep reading" video, video games, and many more topics. I was so disappointed because one of the big reasons for an iPad for me was to be able to play these files on the fly. I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time transcoding my files into a format that would play natively. I also wanted to be able to organize my video files for quick reference.

I downloaded and tried out a few video apps, and I have two major ones that I now use: AVPlayer HD and AcePlayer.