Today was the big day: Youth Workforce Innovations 2012! This event brings together around 100 high school sophomores (and some juniors) from several area districts to participate in a day long conference at RIT. The morning begins with a keynote speaker, and then the students break off and go to one of six workshops: alternative energy, biotechnology, hospitality, information technology, imaging/optics, or microelectronics. After an hour, the students then visit a second workshop for an hour, after which they go to lunch at Gracie's. This was the 6th year for this event, and my third year participating.
As I was teasing yesterday, I decided to do something a little different this year. Ready for the big reveal??? Drumroll, please... I decided to integrate Twitter. Ta-da! (Maybe this sounds a little underwhelming, but cut me some slack - it's tough to generate suspense in a blog post that you can read at your own leisure.) You are probably either thinking, "Big deal..." or wondering how or why I did this; bear with me, I'll explain:
Yesterday I mentioned a paper I wrote about electronic communication and its applications to imaging science outreach and education. Much of the research I did for this paper focused on the shift in science communication from a deficit-based model (talking TO an audience) to a dialogue-based model (talking WITH an audience). I won't go into too much detail (if you really want to know, I can give you my paper to read...) but from my research I developed a number of recommendations for CIS to implement electronic communication into its outreach efforts. One approach I mentioned was to integrate Twitter into classroom discussions and presentations to more actively engage an audience and put my money with my mouth is with regards to following a dialogue-based communication model. As I was developing this idea in my head, I tried to think realistically how this could be done and how such an activity would go... And from this (and a little encouragement from Joe), I got my motivation to give it a shot at Workforce Innovations.
After all, it was time to try something new. Workforce Innovations is a unique event for me in that it brings together all these students from different school districts - for example, let's say that Rush Henrietta sends 10 students to the conference. Those 10 students are then divided up amongst 6 workshops, so an RH student in my workshop may or may not have a classmate in the workshop with them; and if they do, who is to say that classmate is even a friend of theirs. So my audience is made up of students who may or may not even know someone else there, and if they do, they may or may not even like them. This poses some major difficulties when trying to run an interactive workshop, because not only am I a stranger to my audience but most of them are strangers to each other. It is very hard to motivate a high school student to want to participate under such circumstances (and let's face it, if you were in their situation, would you? I know if it were highschool-me, the answer would be, "No way!"). With something like Twitter, students can still interact from the comfort of their seats with their phone (as so many are accustomed to doing) and interact in new ways not already possible. For example, if someone wants to ask or answer a question and isn't comfortable speaking aloud - tweet it. Shyness aside, Twitter is where it's at right now. It's about time that a technology school implement the latest technology, amiright?
Even though I wasn't totally sure how Twitter could come into play or how useful it would be, it seemed like a no-lose situation to try it out: it could either be awesome and really take things to another level, or, I'd just do the regular schtick I have without it. So, why not?
That's enough about background/theory... Again, if you want more justification, I can give you my paper to read. In my next post, I'll talk about how it went today. (Here's a hint!)
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