Abstract:

Postgraduate education is increasingly attracting, for complex reasons, students from emerging economies and other European countries to the public Spanish universities, as it is also happening in other European countries. They are very sensible to innovation, global issues, new technologies, and to appreciate the inclusion of empirical evidences or literature from emerging economies as well as from developed countries. How to deal with this?

An innovative experience was developed in a new course about Family Bussinesses, Innovation and Globalization, in a Masters Program at the author´s institution, designed and controlled by the author: the grading was the result of several tasks:

1. Creation of a blog, or a twitter, to experience possibilities and limitations of social networking in order to obtain reliable information about the general topic of the course. Every 15 days the students have to send to the professor short reports indicating observations about type of "outside" people connecting with the students through their blogs or twitters, classifying type of people, and classifying type of topics and interest or difficulties of using them to obtain knowledge, or create knowledge which could be relevant to know more about the general topic of the course. Professor suggested to Chinese students following Weibo (Chinese Twitter) to write reports which were made available to the other students through the virtual campus of the institution. Best reports were distributed by professor through restricted forums among participants in the course. This incentivated not just individual work, but comparison with other students, and willingness to improve.

2. Research of each student through internet of two case studies, one about family businesses in emerging economies, one in developed economies. Each student wrote and delivered written case studies, and offered oral presentation in the classroom. Active emailing with professor and among students was incentivated to find sources of information, activate a critical perspective, and deliver a good work.

3. Final task, a debate in the classroom. All the students had to answer 3 key questions about key problems addressed in the course by the professor. Answers, during 2 hours, from all the students, orally, had to be based on all the material provided by the same students in their social network activity, and case studies, all of which was made available by professsor in a restricted space of the virtual campus of the home institution. The third hour of this task was to write in two pages a summary of the debate, with answers for each of the 3 questions.

Keywords:

Twitter, Blogs, and Forums in the Classroom.