Thursday, December 16, 2010

Day 2 - Workshops: Track 3 - Summary


"Investigating the use of social media by educators in Saudi Arabia"
Session Leader:  Saddiga Al-Ghalib, Dean, Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, Effat University.

Greetings,

The session was commenced by Dr.Saddiga who presented us with the topic. Then immediately, she requested the participants of the session two divide themselves into two teams : 1. educators and 2. researchers. During the first part of the session the participants of the two teams were separately presented with several tasks that required brainstorming ideas that will identify the use and impact of social media by educators and researchers. After an intense session of brainstorming, the two groups came up with great ideas for their assigned tasks respectively. The second part of the session was initiated. followed by the lunch and prayer break. The different uses of the social media by educators were presented by the 'educators' group and how it can help in improving  and/or maintaining interaction between peers and students. The 'researchers' group presented their ideas of how social media can help in developing, conducting, validating research projects. The group had to also come up with a questionnaire that will investigate the uses,impact,outcome of social media by researchers. The participants of the 'researcher' group formulated questions for the questionnaire draft. In the end the 'educators' group decided to follow-up with their work through collaborating with each other via Twitter hash tag. While on the other hand, the 'researcher' group decided to continue working on the questionnaire draft till they finally come up with a final questionnaire that will distributed among all the researchers of different disciplines to identify how and in what way(s) the researchers use social media and for what for purposes? The first draft of the questionnaire will be reviewed by Dr.Saddiga Al-Ghalib and she took the responsibility of later distributing the first draft for comments and suggestions that would help in designing the final questionnaire.  Dr.Saddiga gathered all the information about the participants so that she can send each on of them some of the interesting and relevant links that will help each group to progress with their group work. On a personal note, I  would just like to mention that i decided to  join the 'researcher' group and i loved the session and the workshop experience completely. The participants of my group were amazing people with great intelligence, energy, and charm. The workshop day ended in a success I am hoping that we could take this short session of the L&T symposium and transform it into a research project on a larger-scale.  

Well, we will just have to wait and watch. 
You keep checking out this blog for more updates!

Signing off!

posted by: Fauziya Ali Ansari ( Alumni, Effat University )


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