Equipping Meteorologists to Effectively Use Social Media to Link to Society

Successfully linking information to knowledge to society increasingly utilizes social media. The successfully and professionally use social media to compete this link to the public is a new faceted of meteorological training. Most college students arrive on campus with a cellphone and a variety of habits dealing with social media. This has both positive and negative attributes. On the positive side the students have experience using the various social media applications and interfacing with their peers across the internet. On the negative side social media habits developed as teenagers may not be appropriate for the scientific and business environment. Some business will encourage or even require their personnel to use social media to help gather information and spread the word about their products. The transition to peer communication to communicating with scientists and non-scientific people around the world takes thought and training. Communication on social media has science, art and ethical aspects that must be mastered to effectively use social media. The importance of social media has increased, and thus standard strategies of education were re-assessed as needing an enhancement.

Standard Instructional Strategies

• Lectures
• Organized scheduled postings on multiple application platforms (homework)
• Instructor critique of posts
• Case studies of successes and failures (Boehrer, 1990)

Vygotsky (1978), says that all learning is social; further, learning is based on. existing relationships. So, to increase comprehension and retention several teaching enhancements were implemented based on social interaction. The chosen enhancements were High Impact Educational Practices and Advanced Strategies to provide program graduates with a solid practical knowledge of use of social media in Broadcast Meteorology. These enhancement included.

High Impact Educational Practices (Kuh, 2008)

• Collaborative social media post development (Collaborative Assignments and Projects)
• Integration of material from multiple meteorology courses with social media (Learning Communities)

Advanced Strategies

• Peer review and constructive criticism
• Group discussions on how to handle common problems such as trolls, aggressive behavior, attacks, and flaming events. An experiment was conducted to employ these additional strategies both within and outside the structured classroom environment during the 2018 -2019 academic year to allow meteorologists in training to become self-aware of professional use of social media.

These techniques are intense one-on-one, face to face training activities designed to be fun and provide a layer of safety for the students to experiment and fail without career impacts. Within the course structure, significant changes in the quality, focus, and science content of these tailored posts were observed. This presentation will describe the techniques with examples, an evaluation of the role in the training process, and an assessment of the efficacy based on student uses of social media after class completed.

References

Kuh, G. (2008): High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, Association of American Colleges and Universities, 44 p.

Boehrer, J. and M. Linsky, (1990): Teaching with Cases: Learning to Question, New Directions for Teaching and Learning (42):41 – 57

Velenchik, A., (1995) The Case Method as a Strategy for Teaching Policy Analysis to Undergraduates, The Journal of Economic Education, 26:1, 29-38

Vygotsky, L., Cole, M, John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., and Souberman, E. (1978): Mind in Society: The Development of Higher: Psychological Processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 159 p