Social media is needed for learning, really?

When you are asked “what are social media?”, what would you think of? Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat? How would you use these social media in learning? Synchronous discussion, find outside resources, or keeping connected with classmates?

These are the questions we normally get stuck because we could have misunderstood them from the beginning. Social media in our minds are websites and applications that are used for content sharing or networking. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “Social” means tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others, and the word “Media” means the system and organizations of communication through which information is spread to a large number of people. Therefore, “Social Media” together means the system and organizations through which individuals spread information to a large number of people in order to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with them. This sounds very similar to what we think if we don’t look carefully. Actually it involves a lot more than just those websites and applications that we are familiar with.

 

Social media, to me, can be categorized as contextual and non-contextual. By contextual, I mean that the information is spread within a certain context. People approach it for the purpose of knowing about a theme, topic, or subject. In this type of social media, individuals tend to have more informative interactions and exchange pertinent information. An example could be hobby communities. On the other hand, non-contextual social media are more discrete. The information propagated in this type of social media can be trivial, random, and about anything. Online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat fall into this category.

 

Before getting into more details about specific social media, let’s look at the other key word in the title, learning. The myth is that whether social media, in spite of the category, help with learning. This question reminds me of the famous Kozma-Clark debate in which two scholars Kozma and Clark dispute about whether media influence learning. Clark thinks that media are mere vehicles but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries cause changes in our nutrition. Only the pedagogical methods have the influence. Whereas, Kozma’s idea about media is that learning is a social progress by the learner and is the reciprocal interaction between the learner’s cognitive resources and aspects of the external environment. Therefore, careful use of media would enable learners to take advantage of its strengths to construct knowledge. My opinion regarding social media is similar to Kozma’s idea about media. In the age of technology, media, including social media, are changing the way we live, let along the way we learn. They are not necessarily affecting the essence of learning, yet definitely impacting how people perceive, organize, communicate information which potentially can be used to form schema.

 

Then, here comes the next question: how do social media influence, or even change, the way we learn? From the connectivists’ perspective, knowledges are outside learners and distributed within a social network which is technologically enhanced. Learning is the process of collecting and connecting distributed knowledges. Then, the methods and strategies we use to process information are key to the learning. Yes, of course, even Clark would agree with me! Social media have their niche in learning. But, why social media failed most time when it is used in learning?

 

I found that the failure cases are often the use of non-contextual social media in formal learning settings. For example, a Public Administration course used Facebook and LinkedIn to try to facilitate students’ out-of-class communication and connections to practitioners in this field. The students of that course ended up neither using these tools for the purpose that the instructor wanted, nor as frequently as the instructor expected. Cases like this reveal the problem of the lack of understanding about social media. This type of usage is exogenous, and is to use social media for the sake of using it. Unfortunately, that’s how most people think social media should be used in learning.

 

The limitations of non-contextual social media being used in formal learning are: 1) they are designed to be used casually and at leisure. They easily distract people from formal learning because of too much random information hanging around. 2) The privacy and security issues concern educational institutions. They have to protect the confidentiality of student educational records and personal identifiable information. Integrating social media elements into the curricula may jeopardize these rights, and they would lose the federal funding. 3) It is hard to assess the social media related tasks. Formal learning requires the learning performance to be assessable so that learners and others concerned can monitor the progress.

 

So, how about contextual social media, such as Mugglenet (the world’s #1 Harry Potter fan site) and Worldcraft Wiki (community for Worldcraft players)? How do they support learning? First of all, the learning in these social media is informal. Although they may rely on some online platforms, the theme oriented environment focus attention. Second, learners come with a purpose and certain level of motivation. There are beneficial to learning. The use of social media in or as learning, the point is to make the learner find the endogenous purpose of using it. For instance, using Facebook to try to increase the connection among students is exogenous, because students would tend to look for other more interesting things on Facebook. If the learner uses Facebook group about, say video editing, to obtain knowledge about editing skills, then it’s more likely to be endogenous, because the helpful information and knowledgeable members would encourage the learner to come back.

 

How learning is processed really depends on the individual. How s/he make sense of knowledge and the world determines the way s/he approaches, synthesizes, and constructs learning. Social media can be used effectively in learning. However, do we have to include them in learning, or do they indeed benefit the process are questions we need to ask ourselves before taking actions.

 

References

Clark, Richard E. (1994). Media will Never Influence Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21-29. DOI 10.1007/BF02299088

Kozma, Robert B. (1994), The Influence of Media on Learning: The Debate Continues, School Library Media Research, Volume 22, Number 4, Summer 1994.

Siemens, G. (2014). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age.

Chen, B., & Bryer, T. (2012). Investigating instructional strategies for using social media in formal and informal learning. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(1), 87-104.

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