The Use of Social Media in U Classrooms

This article in today's issue of the MN Daily, "With Twitter and Pinterest, profs embrace social media," written by Claire Bramel, describes how some professors are interacting with students on a new medium: social media. An advertising class uses Facebook and Twitter to encourage discussion among students, a sociology class uses Facebook to study patterns of social networks, and a graphic design class uses Pinterest for inspiration.

The author is not making an explicit argument for or against the use of social media in classrooms, but in writing the article on this topic she is arguing that it is an increasingly important issue. She's touching on a broader problem of students being distracted in class by social media, and she makes a fact claim that some professors solve this problem by using social media themselves which is also implicitly a policy claim.