Librarian Assisted Twitter Assignment in the Classroom

One of our accounting instructors requested that I help her class become acclimated to Twitter through one of their assignments.

She created an assignment where the class would be debating the ethics of employers judging current and prospective employees based on their social media content. The class is Payroll Accounting, and they are studying this topic from an HR standpoint. The assignment is a great fit for helping the students understand that their online content is easily search-able and accessible, as well as learning the benefits of using social media.

The two sides of the debate are:

Yes - #yessn Yes, it is ethical for employers to judge an employee by their social networking content

No - #nosn No, it is not ethical for employers to judge an employee by their social networking content

I taught the students the basics of using Twitter, the different privacy settings, how to use #hashtags, how to shorten links, and how to search Twitter using http://search.twitter.com/ or following hyperlinked #hashtags as shown below.



Students are asked to tweet from their standpoint in the debate by posting comments and links to different resources. I talked about how their next step is to conduct research and find material to incorporate into the tweets. Researching and sharing information ties into my role as the librarian. The students must tweet four times per week for four weeks. Students are also required to reply directly to their classmates in at least three tweets per week.

I look forward to hearing how other librarians are collaborating with faculty and implementing Twitter and other Social Media in daily instruction.Retweet this