Using social media in small colleges

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Permalink Reply by Isabelle Eaton on July 7, 2009 at 2:47pm

I can vouch for Michelle's addiction to Facebook.

I always get a bit iffy when I hear broad statements being made about students in general. In part, it's because large-group generalizations made without the support of data irk me (if I hear one more comment about how "boys" learn vs how "girls" learn, I think my head will explode. But I digress...). The other reason is that what constitutes a student or learner today is a lot less easily circumscribed than even 20 years ago. I suspect we now have a lot more adult learners, a lot more self-driven learners, a lot more learners with interrupted or stop-and-go educational trajectories, etc. I think we can also safely say that lifelong learning, albeit still a buzzword, is now not such a revolutionary concept. Probably hasn't been for awhile but we did like to talk about this as an emergent trend.

The bottom line issues, for me, in getting learners to take tech. seriously, have less to do with broad "problems" or "characteristics" of "all learners out there" but rather of: a) ensuring familiarity with relevant/emerging tools so that people are not left out. People, myself included, talk about tech as democratizer or a "great equalizer", that it can help foster participation by removing barriers to access, stigma, etc. But the problem remains, I think, that with much of the new tech, and perhaps especially the social media, if you don't participate, you don't exist. Period. So not learning about these techs can be a means of excluding oneself from relevant discussions, whether current or future, and that is problematic in my mind. And, b), of creating meaningful, or "authentic" opportunities for action and agency that don't just feel like tech is being added on as yet another thing to do. To be clear, I think the affordances of tech. are fantastic but to use these to duplicate what is already being done well by other means fails to capitalize on the power of tech. And there's the rub, and my little rant for the day. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Michelle Everson on July 7, 2009 at 9:47pm

Do you think I need to join Facebook's Anonymous, Isabelle? : )

I agree with so much of what you are saying here, Isabelle. There are so many technological tools that I like and that I often think would be interesting to incorporate into my classes, but I don't want to do this simply for the sake of utilizing technology. I feel I need to be able to justify their use in class and that the students need to see how the use of such tools relates to the learning goals of the course. Also, I worry a lot about the students in my courses who are not technologically savvy. I happen to teach lots of courses where I have older students who are often returning to school after several years in the workplace. For some of them, the technology required for the course is scary enough. If I tried to get them to use something like Twitter or Facebook, I worry I would stress some of them out even more than they already are!

On the flip side, however, I do feel in some ways I could make a case for trying to use Twitter in one of my statistics courses. I thought perhaps I could try to find a way for students to look online for misleading graphs or news articles that use statistics, and they might be able to "tweet" these out to the general public (with a short, concise critique as to what the problem with the graph or article is). I see Twitter as a way of conveying information quickly and also starting a dialog with others who have common interests, and perhaps students would see the benefit of sharing information like this (as a way of informing the public, so to speak, about some of the dangers of taking information at face value). I just hesitate to make something like this a required assignment because I'm sure there will be some students who won't be at all interested (or comfortable) in a social networking opportunity like this. I'm therefore thinking of trying this out in the fall but making it extra credit.

As an aside, I tried a new assignment this summer in my statistics course. I brought in an article that claimed that using Facebook was detrimental to one's GPA, and I asked students to critique it and design a new study that would less biased. Students really seemed to enjoy this discussion, and I started the discussion by asking students to raise their hands if they use Facebook. Almost everyone in class did raise their hand, and this is my graduate-level course where I have several non-traditional students. So, perhaps incorporating some social networking opportunities with this audience wouldn't be such a bad idea.

I'm a believer that using certain technological tools has a time and a place. There are many great tools out there, but I think we always have to be cognizant of who our audience is and whether we can related the use of technology with the goals of the course. I use so much technology already in some of my courses that I worry about the impact of adding yet one more thing students might need to keep up with and check on a regular basis. Therefore, I really need to be convinced it will add something of merit to my course.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa M Lane on July 7, 2009 at 6:32pm

I have had similar experiences regarding their exposure to and use of web applications. I'm wondering whether some kind of collaborative research project, using tools like Delicious or Diigo, for example, and maybe a wiki or collaborative doc, might make your point.

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Permalink Reply by Jaime Klein on August 7, 2009 at 1:31pm

A recent Australian study found this issue (in terms of students seeing the relevancy of technology use when they are attending classes) as well.

In guidelines posted at the end of each subsection, the researchers gave specific suggestions on how to increase the understanding of the value of using different forms of technology. These suggestions include specifically and clearly articulating the relevancy of a particular activity to the content and unit objectives and outlining specific assessment value to the technology activity. It may also be important, the researchers suggested, to provide specific assignments to encourage students to interact more with technology activities.

This is a lengthy but valuable document: http://www.netgen.unimelb.edu.au/downloads/handbook/NetGenHandbookA...

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Permalink Reply by Mike Moroney on October 29, 2009 at 1:20am

I agree with Gouri, it is not easy to get students to adopt collaborative learning tools. I suspect there is a certain amount of competitiveness and individualism at work (with my students anyway) and I am certain that there are barriers that prevent easy use of some technologies. Furthermore, group dynamics are not always as they should be.

I teach in a small University in Borneo and am responsible for preparing preservice and inservice teachers to use technology in education. In recent times I have observed that the process of developing a "sense of community" so that groups will function effectively cannot be left to chance. Only after a significant amount of effort and time that student groups started to use their communication facilities for more than organizational meetings. Gilly Salmon, Lave and Wenger all have useful advice on this topic.

One approach that seems to work pretty well with groups of students is to encourage them to use a Ning for the social networking aspects of a "community of practice" and then have them linking this to a wiki where members develop their subject knowledge base. When each group is focused on a well defined problem that has a clear start and ending they seem to be happy.

I often get students to follow a "learning by design" approach whereby they learn a technology as and when they need it to solve the problem at hand (rather than teach them technologies). This approach has worked well for a few years now. I should also mention that I make use of the TPCK framework and associated activity structures to help students make decisions about technology integration into classroom practice. For example, preservice teachers might go off and learn how to podcast once they have decided that would like to create an opportunity for students to revisit subject content after school. Podcasts are particularly effective in the environment I work in because most school children regard something different from English as their home language.

Nings, WordPress, WikiSpaces, Moodle and YouTube are all popular at the moment. With more equipment and better wireless access in schools I am sure teachers will favorably consider a broader range of technologies.

The eLearning XHTML Editor (eXe) is a free download that has proved popular with students. It can be used to develop interactive online content - even SCORM compliant material that can be uploaded into an LMS. It is very easy to use and allows students to create eLearning content that at least resembles the formats of lessons they have learned to design in methods of teaching courses... teaching teachers how to use this software takes about 10 minutes!

Dallas made an interesting point about "generation Y" students - I have been reading some things lately about how children of the baby boomers are quite different to those of previous generations and that perhaps their ways of learning are somewhat different to those of past generations...

Oops, a class has arrived, better give them some attention now...

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Permalink Reply by James Liggins on October 30, 2009 at 9:27am

Meet them where they are. Use Facebook. It has SMS, email, group discussions, tracking, file sharing through links, and you can post a link to your blog. I would not waste too much time trying to change how students like to communicate. If you do, you will be swimming upstream, which may cause you to miss many opportunities to help students learn. Just my two cents.

James

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Permalink Reply by Dallas McPheeters on June 28, 2010 at 12:52pm

Hey Gouri, it's been about a year since you posted this challenge. What have you discovered since then? Can you share with us??
:)

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