Amplified teaching uses social media to extend the learning and teaching event more actively to all participants within and beyond a single physical location and the designated course attendees.

Event amplification is now ubiquitous, with the greatest volumes of coverage around major political events, celebrity news and controversial television programmes. In the library and information sector context, popular demonstrations in defence of libraries have been amplified (so participants in a sit-in are Tweeting what is happening or uploading their video diaries). On a more day-to-day level, some form of amplification is common at professional conferences or even unconferences (participant-driven meetings that do not follow a standard conference format).

The first step in doing this successfully is to assign a clear, unambiguous name to the session. If using Twitter, this will need to be in the form of a hashtag (#), which is usually an acronym for an event; for example, #lat10 for ‘Librarians as Teachers 2010’. Preferably, keep such tags short, as they will use up valuable character space in Tweets. Amplification can be achieved in a number of ways:

Recording the event