Write once, publish many - connecting with students

Here is the scenario.... You teach a course to 200+ students and you need to put information online, and alert the class that the information is available. How do you do it?

Well, in the past you may have emailed the class and just said 'The information can be found at: http://....', however, studiessuggest that students don't check email that often (Students spend a lot of time Facebooking, searching, and texting; Death of Email; Teens: E-mail is for old people; Facebook Messages - some say it's an "email killer," others disagree; Pew Internet data shows us where email stands today among youth).

Right, email may be out. So, you use your local VLE (see Do you speak my language: V is for Volume, Vapourware, Virus, VoIP, VNC, VPN, VLE, Virtual Campus). But that raises another problem. How often to the students check the VLE, and would they find the new material?

OK, so students are not using email that much and may not look at the VLE, what are they using? Well, Facebook, springs to mind. However, not all students use Facebook, and they may not be your 'Friend' on Facebook, so may not see the information.

Blog! (see Do you speak my language: B is for Blog, Backend, Basic, Backbone, Backup, beta software, bash, bug). Are students really reading your blog? Will they see the information? How will they know the blog has been updated? Well, they could be subscribing to your RSS feed (see Do you speak my language: R is for RSS, Router, Root, Ruby), or they could be subscribing to an email alert from your blog (see email problem above), and pick up the changes that way.

Twitter! Everyone uses Twitter, right? Well, studies are giving a mixed message on Twitter as they show that although Twitter is primarily used by 18 - 29 year olds, this translates to less than 20% of students using the service (8% of online Americans use Twitter; Teens And College Students Ignoring Twitter. Part 1: The Stats); Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens), therefore Twitter may not be the answer.

So, what is the answer? To be honest, I don't know. I have not found it, but what I have started doing is to use a 'write once, publish many' approach where I use a combination of the above, and make the process as automated as possible. Admittedly the system is not fool proof, and doesn't publish automatically to all the systems I would like, but that is more a problem of the technology (read limitations of the VLE) than of the idea of 'write once, publish many'.

What I mean by 'write once, publish many' is that when I create online content that notification that the material is available is automatically (or auto-magically) pushed to other systems. For example, when I write on my student blog the fact that I have created a new post is reflected in the RSS feed, automatically gets tweeted on @drnickmorris at Twitter, and also gets posted on my Facebook page. Likewise, if I put out a tweet it gets added to my student blog (and therefore the RSS feed) and on to my Facebook page, and a message on my Facebook page can generate a tweet to @drnickmorris, and get added to the student blog. And as an added bonus all my new tweets on @drnickmorris automatically appear at the top of my university homepage.

And if it is really important, I will even email the class! I would also automatically post such information to the VLE, but the VLE doesn't support such interaction (and for the same reason I won't post on the VLE as there is no way to get the VLE to automatically interact with Facebook or Twitter).

Hopefully, by taking the approach of posting information once, and then having a notification automatically forwarded to other systems students may pick it up!

Now, one potential problem with all of this is the possibility of an infinite loop setting up, that is, you post to a blog, which forwards to Twitter, which sends to Facebook, and then the message gets sent back to Twitter, which goes to the blog.... etc... Luckily, the systems are smart enough (as far as I can tell), for this not to happen.

Finally, you could argue that this is a form of plagiarism, that is, I am re-using my work, but the way I see it 'Write once, publish many' saves effort and means that students have a choice in how (and where) they can find the information I put online.

If you have any great tips for disseminating information online with your students, or if you are a student and would really like information delivered in a particular way, then why not post a comment below?

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Write once, publish many - connecting with students

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