I like social media and think it a great way to increase student engagement in the course. The course has both a facebook group and a twitter feed. All material sent through these channels is voluntary and not part of the required course materials on which you could be examined.
To find the facebook group, click here, or on the facebook icon at the bottom right of the home page. If you join the group, items that get posted on the wall will show up on your own facebook newsfeed (depending on your settings there). You are encouraged to post things relevant to the course to share with other students, or comment on things I or other students post.
Twitter is less utilized by students, but can be a very valuable source for following news and social networking. I am a very active user of twitter on a variety of topics, especially climate and energy, environmental policy, and forest policy. If you want to follow me on twitter, I’m @ghoberg. If you aren’t signed up for twitter, it is relatively straightforward to do so and learn how to do it.
But note you do not have to sign up for twitter to follow course-related tweets. Those directly related to the course will show up in the twitter feed of the course homepage. Or you can just go to twitter.com. If you want to see what I’ve been tweeting about, just click here, or from twitter.com, type “ghoberg” in the search box. All tweets that I think are relevant to the course will be given a #FRST415 hashtag. Hashtags are a way to mark keywords or topics in tweets to simplify searching. So you could also just search for “FRST415”. If you would like to signal to me or others in the class something of relevance, you should use that hashtag as well. Note the current setting for the feed on the homepage is for all those with #FRST415 to be included. If you want to ensure something comes to my attention, also good to add @ghoberg.
A great source for forest policy news is http://treefrogcreative.ca/news/news.php