Social and Collaborative Media: Tools and Strategies for the Educator
Social Media and Education Podcast
When I first heard PhD candidate Susan Bell describe the “conflict between social media and institutional education” I asked myself what does she mean by conflict? I had never thought far enough into the future to see what she already saw coming. Bell described people like myself who not only used the internet for social connection and pleasure but also as a means of continuing our education in the things we are interested in. “Lifelong learners” she called us. Because I am a lifelong learner I am now going to grad school to become a professional educator. Little did I know that the internet could be making my chosen profession obsolete! Bell stated that as professional educators we need to “ shift in how we view knowledge and use knowledge.”
I had to laugh when she told the story about how her daughter would say “Mommy, pause it” at story time, my kids will shout “PAUSE GAME!!” when they are riding their bikes in the street and a car comes. “Pause”, “Restart”, “Fast-forward”, “Rewind” are all terms that my kids learned early in life.
Bell’s concern was that social media will replace institutional education. She paralleled the benefits of institutionalized higher education to those of an online social network.
What does higher education offer?
- Membership to groups.
- Engage in intellectual discussions.
- Access to resources and experts.
- Access to better jobs.
- Gain the respect the degree garners.
- Association with professional communities.
- Guidance through experience and thought processes.
What does social media offer?
- Self expression. (Flickr) – can show my work to millions.
- Sharing enthusiasm for common interests. (Peer review and editing and input)
- Access to experts and personalities. (Access to people you might never meet in person)
- Enhancing personal and professional reputation. (through work posted online)
- Allows regular people access to things that used to take allot of time and resources.
- Changes who we can reach. (Better than office hours)
- Changes how many people we can reach.
- Changes methods of expression.
Bell reminds us that all communication is education. Every time we communicate we learn something. Social media is a new form of communication, dialogic communication, and a new kind of education. Web 2.0 offeres interactive communication/education online. Bell compared it to the difference between giving a lecture and having a class discussion. She stated that there is a huge value in giving everyone a voice. Like many educators though she noted the downside to a world participation is that learners must really use a critical literacy to find the information that is the most relevant to them. (i.e. = not crap.)
Bell posits that the educator’s role in this new environment of social media in education should be:
- We (teachers) are not the gatekeepers. Institutions have to be the gatekeeper.
- Teach students to learn in an information economy. Access to information is their right and their responsibility. No more “I don’t know”
- Teach students the importance of contributing to community. Their value is based on what they give and what they share. No one is alone.
- Students have knowledge that teachers don’t have.. be co-creators and co-producers. We encourage and lead, engage them as peers and empower them to learn things they don’t know.
- Serve as guides as students shape their own paths. You are not limited to the resources that I can provide so you must go forward. We serve as experts to make sure you visit the places you cannot miss and I will interpret the places you are unsure of. I will not stifle you own voice though.
The “conflict” Bell was referring to was not that social media and institutional education cannot co-exsist, it’s that rather then fight or block access to social media, educators need to learn to use social media to empower and engage students. Educators need to teach students that their world is growing and that the power that the technology brings is a gift. Students need to add to that gift, take it’s knowledge and give back to the group.
Delicious social bookmarking in Plain English
Social bookmarking is one of the “social” tools I was able to imagine myself using professionally immediately. I could see applications for it’s use as a student, to keep track of all of my research, and as a teacher tracking down interesting information for my classes. Social bookmarking is a way that I can bookmark documents or web pages online and link those bookmarks to my own website. I can assign tags to those documents to help keep them organized by topic so that my list does not get out of control. I can share my list with other teachers, or students, and I can see their lists as well. Suppose a friend of mine is taking the same literature class I had last semester and needs help getting started on a research paper, I can share my website with her so that she can view some of the research I found without having to spend hours weeding out the non-academic essays posted online. Social bookmarking is one of those “Don’t re-create the wheel” tools that we are all looking for!
http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=83247
10 Principles for the Future of Learning
I couldn’t agree more with just about everything this article had to say. They give 10 prinicples for the future of education, I’ll go over my favorite few.
1. Self Learning. Those of us who have kids know that beginning at about age 2 kids are watching TV and learning from it. Kids learn by watching, they watch their parents walk and they learn to do it. They watch and listen to Dora speak Spanish and they learn to do it. My 4 and 5 year olds taught themselves how to play Lego Star-Wars on Wii. I still have a hard time getting through one level on my own and they finished the game in 3 months. Technology is second hand to children and if educators don’t become a part of the process we will wind up like the traditional library… handy when you can’t find what you want online.
3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility. Access to experts in many fields has increased because of the social networks available online. This open access to knowledge has allowed us to begin to solve problems that would have remained a mystery before. “We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge-creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline.”
8. Lifelong Learning. We see this term again. Thanks to the availability of online information and the social networks individuals who seek information and education will never stop learning. Technology changes the way we read, listen to music, view art, communicate with people near and far and technology changes how we learn. People no longer need to pay tuition to an institution of higher education if they aren’t seeking a degree. They can “self teach” from information they find online or through their social networks.
Learning and education has grown too big for the “four walls” of traditional institutional education. As professional educators we need to find a way to harness some of the potential in this interactive age and bring it back into the school buildings.
http://eduratireview.com/2009/07/10-principles-for-future-of-learning.html/
Twitter as a Learning Tool… Really.
The author describes Twitter as a micro-blog. As an educational tool it is something that instructors can use to get immediate feedback on the relevance of their class or to post reading and writing assignments, encourage discussion among classmates and send out tips to students. Professors might also use Twitter to tweet updated office hours, last minute class cancellations, interesting news learned outside of the classroom. While I can see some potential uses for Twitter in higher education I still have trouble seeing many uses for it as a teacher in high school. I do mention some uses for Twitter at a district level (school administration to students or parents).
Corporations might use it to reach out to new and existing customers and maintain a presence with them on the go. I can also see companies using Twitter as a time keeping tool. A person who works outside of the office can always tweet where they are, how long they will be out and when they expect to return.
Another reason for twitter is to build a professional network or expand a network. Twitter can be a learning tool, but as the author noted, you can sometimes feel like you are blogging to no-one for a while. You need to work to build your own social network and seek out the groups or people you want to learn from. Follow as many people as you can to start with and then tweet away!
http://www.astd.org/LC/2009/0409_galagan.htm
Slideshare on Social Networking and Education by NPR.
Carvin presents the history of social networking in education. I found it very interesting how far back educational networking went. It makes sense that educators would need a current almost real time way of staying connected to that institutional education was the same across the country. USENET was one of the first “forum” style discussion boards available at universities in the late 1970s. Soon to follow were the e-mail discussion lists and then “.org” web sites. With the rise of social networks, what can ligitimatly be used for education? Carvin mentioned several but one that caught my attention was the real-time video social networks. In several classes that I have attended I have noticed that there are some students who do well on written assignments but struggle with class participation. Perhaps these shy students would feel more comfortable participating in video discussion or recording video assignments when their classmates “eyes” were not watching them? Students who feel shy in person may be more able to express themselves in a virtual world.
http://www.slideshare.net/acarvin/social-networking-and-education
Schools Embrace Social Media
I was not 100% convinced that social media like Twitter and Facebook could really benefit schools until I read two key lines in this article.
“More than just making casual connection with friends, social networking sites also help schools keep up with changing media landscapes.
‘First there were papers, then radio, then TV and now the Internet,’ Brauer said. ‘And since newspapers are dying, it’s important to experiment with popular forms of media’.”
Again, I had not seen into the future they way these tech savy individuals had. I had not considered that many 30-somethings don’t read a hard copy paper anymore. Technology has replaced most people’s morning newspaper. Now we get our daily news from our internet home page, RSS feeds, and television. How easy would it be if a school systems Athletic Director could just tweet that the evenings baseball game has been postponed, or the school’s nurse could tweet that the H1N1 vaccination would be available on September 18th at the high school? News that is both current and important to it’s followers available immediately at our fingertips.
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