Social media are still in a very volatile state of development, and many faculty worry about the negative aspects of students who are continually ‘on’ or obsessed with social media. At the same time, there are exciting developments and future possibilities for the intelligent use of social media in education, which are explored in this post.
Although social media are mainly Internet-based and hence a sub-category of computing, there are enough significant differences between educational social media use and computer-based learning or online collaborative learning to justify treating social media as a separate medium, although of course they are dependent and often fully integrated with other forms of computing. We shall see that the main difference is in the extent of control over learning that social media offer to learners.
9.5.5.1 What are social media?
Around 2005, a new range of web tools began to find their way into general use, and increasingly into educational use. These can be loosely described as social media, as they reflect a different culture of web use from the former “centre-to-periphery” push of institutional web sites.
Here are some of the tools and their uses (there are many more possible examples: click on each example for an educational application):
Enables users to access multiple information formats (voice, text, video, etc.) at any time, any place
Figure 9.5.5.1 Examples of social media (adapted from Bates, 2011, p.25)
The main feature of social media is that they empower the end user to access, create, disseminate and share information easily in a user-friendly, open environment. Usually the only cost is the time of the end-user. There are often few controls over content, other than those normally imposed by a state or government (such as libel or pornography), or where there are controls, they are imposed by the users themselves. One feature of such tools is to empower the end-user – the learner or customer – to self-access and manage data (such as online banking) and to form personal networks (for example through FaceBook). For these reasons, some have called social media the “democratization” of the web.
In general social media tools are based on very simple software, in that they have relatively few lines of code. As a result, new tools and applications (‘apps’) are constantly emerging, and their use is either free or very low cost. For a good overview of the use of social media in education, see Lee and McCoughlin (2011).
9.5.5.2 The affordances of social media
Commentators on social media have in particular pushed the concept of affordances. McLoughlin & Lee (2011) identify the following categories of general ‘affordances’ associated with social media (although they use the term web 2.0):
Connectivity and social rapport
Collaborative information discovery and sharing
Content creation
Knowledge and information aggregation and content modification (Burden and Atkinson)
However, we need to specify more directly the unique pedagogical characteristics of social media:
9.5.5.3 Presentational characteristics
Social media enable:
networked multimedia communication between self-organising groups of learners
access to rich, multimedia content available over the Internet at any time or place (with Internet connection)
learner-generated multimedia materials
opportunities to expand learning beyond ‘closed’ courses and institutional boundaries
9.5.5.4 Skills development
Social media,when well designed within an educational framework, can help with the development of the following skills (click on each to see examples):
It can be seen that social media can be extremely useful for developing some of the key skills needed in a digital age.
9.5.5.5 Strengths and weaknesses of social media
Figure 9.5.5.5 presents a diagrammatic analysis of various e-learning tools. I have arranged them primarily by where they fit along an epistemological continuum of objectivist, constructivist and connectivist (colour coded), but also I have used two other dimensions, teacher control/learner control, and credit/non-credit. Note that this figure also enables traditional teaching modes, such as lectures and seminars, to be included and compared.
Figure 9.5.5.5 Analysis of social media from an educational perspective (adapted from Bates, 2011)
Figure 9.5.5.5 represents a personal interpretation of the tools, and other teachers or instructors may well re-arrange the diagram differently, depending on their particular applications of these tools. The position of any particular tool in the diagram will depend on its actual use. Learning management systems can be used in a constructivist way, and blogs can be very teacher-controlled, if the teacher is the only one permitted to use a blog on a course. However, the aim here is not to provide a cast-iron categorization of e-learning tools, but to provide a framework for teachers in deciding which tools are most likely to suit a particular teaching approach. Indeed, other teachers may prefer a different set of pedagogical values as a framework for analysis of the different tools.
However, to give an example from Figure 9.5.5.5, a teacher may use an LMS to organize a set of resources, guidelines, procedures and deadlines for students, who then may use several of the social media, such as photos from mobile phones to collect data. The teacher provides a space and structure on the LMS for students’ learning materials in the form of an e-portfolio, to which students can load their work. Students in small groups can use discussion forums or FaceBook to work on projects together.
It can be seen that social media now enable teachers to set online group work, based on cases or projects, and students can collect data in the field, without any need for direct face-to-face contact with either the teacher or other students. Learners can access learning materials through open content, and also access other experts on a topic through the experts’ web sites, and learners can post media-rich assignments either individually or as a group. These assignments when assessed can be loaded by the learner into their own personal learning environment for later use when seeking employment or transfer to graduate school.
The example above is in the framework of a course for credit, but the framework would also fit the non-institutional or informal approach to the use of social media for learning, with a focus on tools such as FaceBook, blogs and YouTube. These applications would be much more learner driven, with the learner deciding on the tools and their uses. The most powerful examples are connectivist or cMOOCs, as we saw in Chapter 7.
However, many students are not, at least initially, independent learners (see Candy, 1991). Many students come to a learning task without the necessary skills or confidence to study independently from scratch (Moore and Thompson, 1990). They need structured support, structured and selected content, and recognized accreditation. The advent of new tools that give students more control over their learning will not necessarily change their need for a structured educational experience. However, learners can be taught the skills needed to become independent learners (Moore, 1973; Marshall and Rowland, 1993). The new tools will make this learning of how to learn much more effective but still only in most cases within an initially structured environment.
The use of social media raises the inevitable issue of quality. How can learners differentiate between reliable, accurate, authoritative information, and inaccurate, biased or unsubstantiated information, if they are encouraged to roam free? What are the implications for expertise and specialist knowledge, when everyone has a view on everything? As Andrew Keen (2007) has commented, ‘we are replacing the tyranny of experts with the tyranny of idiots.’ Not all information is equal, nor are all opinions. Many students look for structure and guidance, and it is the responsibility of teachers to provide it. We therefore need a middle ground between the total authority and control of the teacher, and the complete anarchy of the children roaming free on a desert island in the novel “Lord of the Flies” (Golding, 1954). Social media allow for such a middle ground, but only if as teachers we have a clear pedagogy or educational philosophy to guide our choices and use of the technology.
9.5.5.6 Summary
In summary:
learners now have powerful tools through social media for creating their own learning materials or for demonstrating their knowledge.
courses can be structured around individual students’ interests, allowing them to seek appropriate content and resources to support the development of negotiated competencies or learning outcomes.
content is now increasingly open and freely available over the Internet; as a result learners can seek, use and apply information beyond the bounds of what a professor or teacher may dictate.
students can create their own online personal learning environments
many students will still need a structured approach that guides their learning
teacher presence and guidance is likely to be necessary to ensure high quality learning via social media
there is though a middle ground between complete freedom and overdirection that can enable the development of the key skills needed in a digital age.
The use of social media for learning thus represents a major power shift from teachers to learners.
Activity 9.5.5
1. Take one of your courses, and analyse how social media could be used in your course. In particular:
What new learning outcomes could the use of social media help develop?
Would it be better just to add social media to the course or to re-design it around social media?
2. I have offered only a cursory list of the unique pedagogical characteristics of social media. Can you think of others that have not already been covered in other parts of this chapter?
3. How does this chapter influence your views on students bringing their own device to class?
4. Are you (still) skeptical about the value of social media in education? What do you see as its downsides?
Please use the comment box to share your answers.
This is the last of five posts on the unique pedagogical characteristics of different media. The other four posts were:
This post will be followed by a short section on deciding about media.
Feedback
Comments again will be most welcome. In particular:
can you suggest other unique characteristics of social media?
does Figure 9.5.5.5 work for you? How would you ‘place’ social media in context with other media?
examples, please: I’m looking for good examples that illustrate these unique features – or other unique characteristics I haven’t considered
is this the place to discuss personal learning environments? (Probably!). However, it seems to me they deserve a section of their own, maybe under design. Any thoughts on this would be welcome
lastly, does it make any sense to differentiate between media these days? After all, isn’t everything multimedia now?
References
Bates, T. (2011) ‘Understanding Web 2.0 and Its Implications for e-Learning’ in Lee, M. and McCoughlin, C. (eds.) Web 2.0-Based E-Learning Hershey NY: Information Science Reference
Candy, P. (1991) Self-direction for lifelong learning San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Golding, W. (1954) The Lord of the Flies London: Faber and Faber
Keen, A. (2007) The Cult of the Amateur: how Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture New York/London: Doubleday
Lee, M. and McCoughlin, C. (eds.) Web 2.0-Based E-Learning Hershey NY: Information Science Reference
Marshall, L and Rowland, F. (1993) A Guide to learning independently Buckingham UK: Open University Press
McCoughlin, C. and Lee, M. (2011) ‘Pedagogy 2.0: Critical Challenges and Responses to Web 2.0 and Social Software in Tertiary Teaching’, in Lee, M. and McCoughlin, C. (eds.) Web 2.0-Based E-Learning Hershey NY: Information Science Reference
Moore, M. and Thompson, M. (1990) The Effects of Distance Education: A Summary of the Literature University Park, PA: American Center for Distance Education, Pennsylvania State University
Thanks for the guidelines you have provided here. Another thing I would like to say is
that computer memory requirements generally rise
along with other developments in the technological know-how.
For instance, when new generations of processor chips are brought to the market, there
is usually a related increase in the size preferences of both
computer system memory as well as hard drive room. This
is because the software program operated through these processor chips will inevitably surge in power to make new engineering.
Dr. Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.
Dr. Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.
Thanks for the guidelines you have provided here. Another thing I would like to say is
that computer memory requirements generally rise
along with other developments in the technological know-how.
For instance, when new generations of processor chips are brought to the market, there
is usually a related increase in the size preferences of both
computer system memory as well as hard drive room. This
is because the software program operated through these processor chips will inevitably surge in power to make new engineering.