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This commentary is a reflective discussion of how to use simple social media tools in college-level writing courses, and contains research elements such as effective examples of what is attainable and possible when incorporating blogs (e.g., Posterous) and Twitter in the college classroom. In order to do this, it uses reflective writing with a focus on failures/successes in past courses, and also incorporates students' own comments on blogging and Twitter. The chapter's findings include the following: The overall ease of use and relative simplicity of certain social media tools make for low barriers of entry for a majority of students. The mobile accessibility of these online communicative technologies should also be of specific appeal. These characteristics should encourage student participation in ways that content management systems like Blackboard do not. The convenience of and allowance for quick and easy sharing of information via blogging and microblogging can also mean that each is often quicker than email for contacting someone. What makes both better than Blackboard concerns how they, when taken together, sustain class discussion, keeping it alive, present, and continuous. If proper affordances are made in terms of framing and timing, social media can make for successful additions to college-level courses. Simple tools allow and encourage students to document and reflect on their own learning in ways that are meaningful and unique as they are.

With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the status of teaching has been moved towards the centre of concerns in the UK higher education (HE) sector. This interest develops further the notion of teaching excellence created through various institutional and sectoral schemes such as the Higher Education Academy (HEA) fellowship. Whilst excellence schemes and the TEF all highlight the importance of teaching, they also run the danger of reducing it to lists and simplified proxies.

This chapter argues that reductive characterisations of teaching, through metrics supporting the TEF, such as the national student survey, or ‘idealised’ descriptions of the foundational aspects of ‘excellent practice’, all lead to partial accounts of the teaching process. Such characterisations might lead to creeping performativity and increasing organisational attempts to control. An alternative account of teaching is proposed based on complexity theory. This sees teaching as emergent, multifaceted and contextually based. It refutes notions of ‘best practice’ and argues that any attempt to capture ‘excellent practice’ is to reduce the holistic nature of the processes that bring teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment together.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.