More on BoB and Twitter…

Historian Dr Marcus Collins is another ‘early adopter’ of the BoB (Box of Broadcasts) service and, as with his colleague Prof Chris Szejnmann, he has been combining it with Twitter in the classroom. He comments:

I’m also a great fan of both BoB and Twitter. So far, I’ve been using both in just one module: a third-year seminar on the Beatles and the 1960s. I’ve used Twitter as a way of encouraging directed small-group discussions at various stages in the class, then using their Tweets in discussion within the whole group of 37 students. The students are initially bemused by the idea that Twitter has educational uses, but soon get into the swing of things and end up talking more in the seminars than they’d otherwise do. The only problem I’ve found is that not every small group tweets every time. […]

 As for BoB, I’m using it in a slightly different way from Chris. The first thing I’ve done is to show the Beatles’ students its riches as a research tool. They’re all writing papers comparing the Beatles and another musical act, and I’ve created playlists of documentaries and performances of the Beatles and their contemporaries for this purpose. Next semester, I’m considering asking each student in my class on twentieth-century Britain to pick a documentary and write an essay suggesting revisions on the basis of their reading of written secondary sources. I am open-mouthed at the extent of the archive and its ease of use.

 If you’re a member of staff at Loughborough, trying logging in to http://bobnational.net and searching for ‘Beatles’ and you’ll see what Marcus means. Remember that all the programmes and playlists that are displayed in the search results are material that can legitimately be shown in the classroom.