Social Media and note-taking skills: changing opinions
Note-taking skills are something many learners need to master, as they move through school and into English-language university course settings. It's also a necessary skill for the working world, where notes have to be taken on presentations and in meetings and in our day-to-day lives - planning events, writing down directions and so on.
Many of us use abbreviations to help ensure our notes are concise, and most of these seem to be fairly widespread in English-language settings. I wanted to give learners the opportunity to see and practice using some of these abbreviations.
The context of this lesson focuses on Megan Phelps-Roper, a high-profile former member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and her TED talk on how she managed to leave the group. Using the current discussions around political and religious divides on social media and the trend for ever-more polarised opinions as a background and introduction, we look at how bubbles of opinion are formed by algorithms, and how this can be overcome.
The lesson
In the previous lesson....
In order to introduce learners to note-making, I find it useful to start with some ideas and examples of how we make notes. The University of Leeds has a great page on note-taking strategies. I give learners a copy of this page to read as homework before the lesson.
Stage 1
To start the lesson proper, we look at some examples of note-taking (see below). Learners discuss together:
Which note-taking structure has been used (refer to the homework reading)
What kinds of words the writer has used (nouns, verbs, prepositions etc)
Which structures have been used (full sentences, bullet point lists, abbreviations, subtitles etc.)
What do you think the abbreviations in each example mean?
After a brief feedback session, I ask learners what the note-taking examples have in common. (Answers are available in the downloadable Teacher's Notes).
Stage 2
Using Slide 1 of the presentation as stimulus, ask learners where they get their news from, and how often they use each news media source.
Focus in on the social media element. Learners discuss the following questions in pairs or small groups -
How are the news items on your social media feeds selected?
Do you tend to follow people with similar views to your own, or different?
Have you, or anyone you know, ever had an argument online? What about? Did the argument get resolved in the end? How?
Do you know of any high-profile social-medial users who frequently make inflammatory statements? Why would they do this?
Plenary feedback could be useful here, as learners may well have very different views from one another, and some may need examples of social media users making inflammatory statements (see lesson materials below).
Stage 3
Move to Slide 3 of the presentation. Learners discuss the questions in pairs. If they haven't heard of the WBC before, you might have to fill in some information using their Wikipedia entry or similar.
Stage 4
Introduce Megan Phelps-Roper as a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Inform learners that her TED talk covers leaving the group and information on online discussion management. The talk is 15 minutes long, so they will be concentrating for an extended period of time. If you feel it is appropriate, use the English subtitles available. If your learners are ready for the challenge, you can go without. Phelps-Roper is an excellent speaker with a fairly neutral American accent and clear enunciation.
Learners should choose a note-taking style from their reading homework and the examples at the start of the lesson. They then make notes while watching and listening to the speech. To finish, learners compare their notes and see if they have written down similar points.
If you set homework, you could ask them to write up their notes as a summary of the talk they have just seen, including an opinion on Phelps-Roper's ideas for more productive online discussion.
Materials
