{"id":6833,"date":"2012-02-16T11:06:30","date_gmt":"2012-02-16T16:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=6833"},"modified":"2012-02-16T11:06:30","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T16:06:30","slug":"using-facebook-to-share-ecology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2012\/02\/16\/using-facebook-to-share-ecology\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Facebook to share ecology"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This post contributed by Nadine Lymn, ESA Director of Public Affairs<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do the small ground finch, medium ground finch, and Charlie Sheen have in common?\u00a0 You may know the answer after today\u2019s lecture\u2026;)\u201d<\/p>\n

James McGraw (pictured above), a professor of ecology at West Virginia University, posted the above question on his Facebook Group page for undergraduate biology.\u00a0 After several others had ventured guesses, one astute student provided the correct answer:\u00a0 \u201ccharacter displacement.\u201d\u00a0 Yes, groan-inducing puns (are there any others?) became one characteristic of the professor\u2019s social media experiment which he relates in a recent article in the Bulletin<\/em><\/a> <\/em>of the Ecological Society of America.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d noticed that in this large (100-plus) introductory biology course, attracting and holding the attention of students was growing ever more challenging.\u00a0 Not only is the sheer size not conducive to effectively engaging students, many undergraduates enrolled in such classes are simply getting a requirement out of the way, and may not be terribly enthusiastic or see the relevance of the material to their lives or career goals.\u00a0 And the constant distraction of online alternatives to one\u2019s actual surroundings added new and powerful competition to the professor\u2019s attempt to capture the attention of his pupils.<\/p>\n

As McGraw noted with dismay: \u201c\u2026.many of them can be found staring intently at their smart phones, tapping away at the face of their ever present electronic companions\u2026.some of these students remain transfixed by their i-devices 20 minutes into the lecture.\u201d<\/p>\n

So McGraw decided to become part of their online conversation and started a Facebook Group page for his biology class.\u00a0 Recognizing that some have significant privacy concerns with social media, he did not make this a course requirement and did not share vital course material via Facebook to which nonjoiners did not also have access.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 His primary objective was to provide students opportunities to think more deeply about ecological topics.<\/p>\n

By the end of the semester, 119 out of 189 students (63 percent) had joined the Biology Facebook Group.\u00a0 Forty percent were \u201clurkers\u201d who never posted a \u201clike\u201d or a \u201ccomment\u201d while 71 students contributed comments, links, or \u201cliked\u201d a particular post.<\/p>\n

McGraw\u2019s used the Biology Facebook Group page to link news articles that were relevant to material covered in class, to encourage students to take advantage of relevant lectures on campus, to introduce them to other ecologists, and to generate discussion about a particular concept.\u00a0 He also started a miniseries of \u201cCreature Feature\u201d posts whereby students who participated in extra-credit bird walks got to vote on their favorite bird of the day, usually by selecting the \u201csplashiest\u201d bird species, such as Indigo Bunting<\/a> or Scarlet Tanager<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the end of the semester, McGraw asked students to provide anonymous feedback about the usefulness of the Biology Facebook page.\u00a0 Eighty percent felt the group page had helped them learn more about the topic and the students\u2019 performance relative to previous exams suggests that they did.\u00a0 Perhaps coinciding with that outcome, the social medium helped bridge the gap between the professor and the students by creating a more intimate environment than could be achieved in the large classroom.<\/p>\n

Said McGraw in the ESA Bulletin<\/em> article:\u00a0 \u201cThe social barriers so typical of student-professor interactions were not absent on Facebook, but were much reduced by the more casual atmosphere of the posts and the frequent use of humor\u2026..I especially enjoyed that certain students started feeling secure enough to crack jokes and post their own links to ideas we had talked about in class.\u201d\u00a0 And McGraw believes the social media outlet gave him a supplemental way to show students how ecology is relevant to their lives.<\/p>\n

How do you use Facebook or other social media to share your enthusiasm for ecology?<\/p>\n

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This post contributed by Nadine Lymn, ESA Director of Public Affairs \u201cWhat do the small ground finch, medium ground finch, and Charlie Sheen have in common?\u00a0 You may know the answer after today\u2019s lecture\u2026;)\u201d James McGraw (pictured above), a professor of ecology at West Virginia University, posted the above question on his Facebook Group page for undergraduate biology.\u00a0 After several…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[100,538,92,971,1239,1362],"class_list":["post-6833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology-education","tag-biology","tag-ecology","tag-environment","tag-facebook","tag-social-media","tag-teaching-ecology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}