Social media in education

As part of my Masters Degree, I researched and wrote a paper on the use of social media technologies in teaching and learning. I looked specifically at how it might relate to constructivist teaching pedagogy, and specifically, if social media could be an effective tool for assisting students in knowledge building and meaning-making activities. This post is one in a series examining the five main themes that I discovered in my research.

Introduction

The first objections I often hear from people when I talk about using social media as an educational tool is, “I want my students focused on school, not chatting with each other about what they are going to do after school.” Or, “Social media? I don’t want to see pictures of everyone’s food!”

So the first step is to clarify the way I used the word ‘social’ for this study. In the context of education, social wasn’t used to mean leisure activities. Certainly, we often think of social time as something we do with friends outside of work or school. But social media use can be more encompassing. Social is about how we interact with each other, how we relate, how we connect as individuals. It is in this broader sense that I am interested in social media, and through it, social learning. Therefore, in order to discern useful strategies for using social media in education, I first needed to frame the enquiry within a learning environment. There is much talk about how cell phones, social media, and social computer technologies can be a distraction for students. This is true! In fact, I discovered many studies that proved just that. In situations where students were required to participate in sustained private study, or conventional lecture / note taking / recall, the use of social media such as Facebook were shown to negatively affect outcomes. Imagine trying to read Faulkner or Dostoyevsky while someone keeps interrupting you! In a more specific view, my interest was in using social media to support collaborative, connected learning through social constructivism. Situations where students are learning together could be an appropriate opportunity for the enhanced connectivity of social media.

Social constructivism is a model put forward by epistemological thinkers such as Dewey (1938), Bruner, (1966, 1996), Piaget & Inhelder (1969), and Vygotsky (1978). Constructivism posits that knowledge is constructed by the learner through their ability to compare learning experiences with their existing schemas. Social contructivism, as promoted by Vygotsky and Leont’ev includes the proviso that this meaning making is not only enhanced through social interaction with others, but that learning itself is primarily social, and rejects that the locus of knowledge resides solely within the individual (Palincsar, 1998). In other words, we learn better when we are able to talk to, share information with, and ponder with others about concepts.

Click here to continue to part 1: Engagement

References