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Set a Reminder Details >GETideas.org creates events that provide the opportunity to collaborate, share ideas, and comment on transformational topics in education. Our Virtual Roundtables employ the latest online collaboration tools, from threaded conversations to webinars to Google+ hangouts. Our goal is to inspire and inform.
Join our hosts the week of February 20 for a Virtual Roundtable discussion on social media:
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Anna Batchelder, Bon Education |
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Dr. Ron Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + Design |
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Judy O’Connell, Charles Sturt University |
Expand your knowledge and network! Join this week-long discussion to exchange
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18 Responses to Virtual Roundtable: Social Media in Education – What’s Working and What’s Not
Evidence shows that social media is affecting the ways in which people find, create, share, and access knowledge, through rich media opportunities and in collaboration with each other.
Much of this exploration is core to learning, especially as it promotes competencies for jobs that are part of a knowledge-based economy. Given this,
• Should researchers, practitioners, and decision makers foster social media in order to monitor and investigate ongoing developments in learning?
• What barriers exist to using social media as a learning platform?
• What are some break-through practices being implemented today?
I am interested in the third question. What are some breakthrough practices being implemented today? If social media are to be effective then we have to know how to curate comments, twitters, blog entries and exchanges on Facebook. The curatorial approach means learning how to critically engage with reducing the quantity of information into a manageable pattern that can then be evaluated. We, at Emily Carr are looking into a new program that would use curatorial means and methods to engage with large data sets and manage information in new ways.
Fascinating. This is where information visualization and design are critical. Filters are important too. Do you have specifics you can share about this? I’d love to learn more.
Finally, to what extent do you think curation should be automated with algorithms (a la Google alerts) vs having humans curate content?
I recently had the privilege of talking to a group of parents about the culture of schools and the education that their children were receiving during what is clearly a transitional phase in the history of education.
Many of the parents were very worried about their children and with some justification. This was a boy’s high school and the parents were concerned that their sons were spending an inordinate amount of time on computers engaging in the use of social media, as well as playing video games. I put up a slide with the words moral panic written in bold and this seemed to describe their feelings — a combination of hostility, fear and acceptance.
In this context, the role of social media from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest, seemed to provoke even more hostility. Yet, Twitter is an endless flow of news and conversational links between friends and strangers. It allows and sometimes encourages exchanges that have varying degrees of value. Twitter is also a tool for people who don’t know each other to learn about shared interests. These are valuable aspects of this tightly wrought medium that tend towards the interactivity of human conversation and the spontaneity that often frames learning experiences.
Twitter has generated a revolution in human communications. Information in whatever form, depending on context, can be dangerous or benign. But information exists in a very precise fashion within a defined context. Twitter is somewhere in between text messages and instant messages, an interlude and an activity that connects events and experiences through the web as a hub. And crucially, learning at all levels is an inevitable outcome of these virtual conversations.
Inevitable, because learning occurs across all media forms sometimes in a direct fashion and other times indirectly. The parents I talked to need to become comfortable with the learning potential of social media. They are here to stay.
Social Media teach students many things (both good and bad), from learning how to collaborate over networks (an essential skill for the future) to learning how to bring their social life into the matrix of school activities. Social media most importantly accentuate non-linear forms of learning and this challenges conventional school structures as well as parental notions of progression through predictable learning experiences. Social media also challenge formal methods of learning. Yet, informal learning may well be at the heart of what social media provide in addition to widening communities of interest well beyond the boundaries of schools. These virtual communities may crowdsource answers to research questions for university students and may lead to all sorts of productive conversations among high school students. The challenge is to capture the value and this may well be one of the most important goals for schools to pursue.
“Capturing the value” of social media is critical. When it comes to using social media to promote critical thinking, content knowledge, learning about learning, research, etc. educators and learners really need to think about when these tools add value and when they just “add to the noise”. Giving teachers and students time to think about this in an open way is critical first step school leadership can take to help ensure value is captured by awesome educational potential of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Schools need to have a philosophy of the role of technology and social media within their own communities.
1) Should researchers, practitioners, and decision makers foster social media in order to monitor and investigate ongoing developments in learning?
Definitely! At Bon Education, we work with schools and organizations across the Middle East. Social media is a gift to students, educators, principals and policymakers in the region that want to stay abreast of the latest trends in learning, what works and what doesn’t. Many students and educators lack access to extensive libraries, journal collections, formal coursework and ongoing professional development. That said, governments are increasingly putting computers and Internet connections into schools and offering free wifi in select public locations or cafes. When teachers and learners have the digital literacy to make the most of these tools, their access to resources, experts, ideas and ongoing professional development expands tremendously – this is critical for the continued improvement of education and skill development in the region.
Furthermore, social media helps schools and organizations in the region learn from one another. This is important because while it is helpful to borrow and lend education ideas between different countries, it is also extremely helpful to use social media as a tool to see how local schools (that share similar social and cultural norms) are adapting to new (and old) developments in learning and learning technologies. For the last 3 years I have been involved in ICT professional development initiatives in Ras al Khaimah (RAK). The RAK Teachers Network http://www.rakteachersnetwork.ning.com (an online social network for RAK educators and principals) has been tremendously successful at fostering the sharing of ideas, questions and best practices between educators in the region, especially between those in the city and those in the more remote mountain regions.
2) What barriers exist to using social media as a learning platform?
The big barriers I see when I work with school stakeholders in Middle East are:
• Lack of understanding that the tools exist, especially amongst school leaders and decision-makers.
• Lack of understanding of the value of social media to the learning process.
• Lack of Arabic-language or robust bilingual social learning platforms with reliable built in translation engines and basic how-to user guides.
• Need for clear policies around how social learning platforms can be used in schools and to connect schools with the community. In areas where education is very “top down,” the people at the top need to work with the educators and students “on the ground” to put in place policies that incentivize the educational uses of social learning tools for education purposes.
• In some cases the tools are in place and educators are aware of them. But, there is not a well thought out education program that connects the tools strategically with existing curriculum and professional development. Social learning platforms need community managers and a community of people that feel genuine incentive to use the platforms on a regular basis. For more on this, read my blog post “What makes an online community work?”
http://dotlearnt.com/2010/09/29/what-makes-and-online-community-work/
3) What are some break-through practices being implemented today?
One of my favorite social learning initiatives is Peer 2 Peer University—an online open licensed learning ecosystem (or “university”) based on the concept of peer learning. Anyone can create and facilitate a course on P2PU as long as she releases the course under an open license. I recently co-facilitated a course in the School of Education on Using Social Media to Promote Deeper Learning. What I loved about the course is that it brought together educators from around the world (Mexico, USA, UAE, Japan, Spain, Canada…) to share and learn from one another around a series of semi-structured tasks.
Unlike other open education resource repositories that contain a wealth of information, but few truly genuine social learning interactions, P2PU combines the “repository” idea with facilitation and interaction around shared goals (tasks). Sounds simple, but as I mentioned above, the programing around social learning platforms and online content is critical to making them truly useful for the classroom and continuing teacher professional development process. To learn more about the P2PU School of Education courses, visit:
http://p2pu.org/en/schools/school-of-ed-pilot/
-Anna
Great thoughts on this topic. I am particularly interested in how policy needs to be implementd to foster this type of delivery of knowledge. would new policies combined with different job roles in the education system (i.e.community management) provide deeper learning for students or a more efficient system of deliveing knowledge?
Mary Anne
We have a Faculty of Culture and Community whose mandate is to try and understand the many different ways in which educational institutions could become more permeable. I do think we need to evaluate the ways in which different subject areas are developed and taught to incorporate and model the radically different ways in which educational institutions are being changed by informal learning.
Anna
I really like the model of Peer 2 Peer University. Do you feel that the interchanges were substantial and that you learned new things?
Definitely. Obviously there was some attrition by participants (which is a challenge), but I was very impressed by the level of collaboration and thinking that went into our topic “using social media to promote deeper learning”. P2PU became a forum for meeting people with a mutual interest. Many of the discussions were then carried off the platform into Google Docs, Skype, etc.
When our group was evolving a definition of deeper learning, I hadn’t ever thought much about divergent learning as being a component of deeper learning. This was proposed by a community member and led to lots of person thinking around this. It was also great to see the lesson plan ideas that got shared. One teacher had her students in the USA advise an Australian business women on whether or not she should bring her business to the USA. The students had to conduct online research for a real world project to help a real person make a very real world decision via social media/Skype. This lesson inspired the class for sure!
To see one of the post course reflections by a participant, click here:
http://www.k12opened.com/blog/archives/888
Another initiative that I have been involved with, and which is having significant impact in schools, is the Powerful Learning Practice initiative. http://plpnetwork.com/ Schools form teams, and then work online, using collaborative synchronus and asynchronus models of learning (time-zones make this valuable) as well as lots of social media engagement. This initiative is not open source, but as a formalised professional model of learning for teachers and school leaders it has been highly successful just because it does make best use of socially connected media.
Thanks Judy. Looks awesome. Are there specific things you do to encourage ongoing participation amongst members? Also, how do courses get “taught”. Are there facilitators? -Anna
There most certainly are facilitators, and they are all practitioners in the field, so the whole thing is very authentic!
Awesome!
Can schools built on a mid-twentieth century industrial model of education promote critical thinking in the 21st century? Can twenty to forty students sitting in a classroom develop the insights needed to meet and challenge not only their own points of view, but also those of others?
Can social media facilitate the changes we need in pedagogy and education?
Teachers are passionate people, committed to providing students with rich learning experiences and diverse opportunities to help them rise to the challenges that our world provides. The 21st century conception of learning is about much more than simply adopting new skills and integrating them into the curriculum or purchasing new technologies and placing them in classrooms–it is the fundamental shift from a teacher-centred learning environment to a student-centred one. It’s not the size of the class that is the issue. I know of schools that ‘teach’ the whole year level in one space – we are talking of over 150 students! But the key is that the students are working on project-based initiatives and using the digital tools that suit the purpose of their work. This is the real action for developing insight – working face to face or face to connection – doesn’t matter if the mindset has shifted. Social media is a key player in shifting this mindset. In fact, equipping every learner for the 21st century involves skills, pedagogy and technology, with collaboration and creativity being emblematic of the paradigm shift underpinning these changes. In such a context and environment social media is a powerful tool for connectedness and future learning.
Agreed. I’d also like to see schools bring more community members into the day-to-day instruction (and bring kids more into the community). While I have so many wonderful teachers in my life that taught in schools their whole career, I’ve often wondered why schools don’t bring in more non-traditional “teachers” or facilitators from fields outside of education to expose kids to ideas, cultures, processes, etc that happen in careers outside of schools. Using social media to facilitate this process is a good first step…
The 2011 Digital Universe Study (IDC, 2011) confirms the digital growth, complexity and diversity of information sources, explaining that the challenge is to know how to tame the chaos and extract value.
http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/emc-digital-universe-2011/index.htm
The 2011 Digital Universe Study:Extracting Value from chaos.
Imagining the Future provides a history and a forecast from combined experts and voxpop voices in tracking and predicting change.
Because of technology students expect to find information online quickly and easily! Yet these same students are often novices when it comes to searching for and finding information. As teachers, we know that the empowered learner calls upon information inquiry skills to connect what he or she knows; asks intriguing questions about what is not known; investigates the answers; and then constructs new understandings to share with others. Being able to research well is a key component to any kind of learning. Yet without being taught how to be critical and perceptive in information environments, those doing the looking simply will not have the sophisticated skills or understandings needed to navigate complex information environments, then filter and evaluate the information they do happen to find.
Social media can be part of the formula that combines content and curiosity with a technology-tool-enabled approach to solve problems and think creatively. Our students need be well-equipped to make useful connections with the real information world of today and the future.
As teachers we encourage a combination of tools and skills to find, remix, create and produce both scholarly and creative responses to the challenges we provide. We must also encourage and build the capacity of students to engage with content in the most effective way.