Why use social media in your studies and research?

We thought it would be useful to start off with an introduction to why you should use social media in your study and research – so an overview of what social media is, the role of social media in study and research, and how can it be used in the university environment. 

The below is an extract from the first chapter of Meg’s book Studying and Researching with Social Media where she talks you through this context.  You can also read the first chapter of Studying and Researching with Social Media and take Meg’s Social Media Competency Quiz here.

Have any questions for Meg?  Do leave any comments to share your thoughts, experiences or questions.

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OVERVIEW

This chapter charts the rise of social media since the early 2000s and outlines why social media are important to twenty-first-century life and learning. It provides a brief overview of the educational theory that is relevant to social media and education as a way of helping you understand why lecturers might be using social media in teaching and learning. The chapter also describes the benefits of using social media for research, paying particular attention to the value of communicating with peers, keeping up with the latest research, improving efficiency and productivity, promoting your academic career, and disseminating your work. Issues around competency and ‘digital natives’ are also explored, as is the role of the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) in the modern higher education context.

The focus of the chapter is on how social media can support effective learn­ing and research, but it also aims to put less ‘tech-savvy’ readers at ease by explaining that, to use social media tech and tools, you don’t need to have any special knowledge (for example, how to write html) and you don’t need access to specialised hardware (for example, servers). Instead, it shows that using social media is easy and that anyone can teach themselves to use online digital technologies effectively to support their study and research.

WHAT IS ‘SOCIAL MEDIA’?

Social media are simply those digital technologies that allow users to easily create and share material with others via the internet. The internet hasn’t always been used in this way. In the early days, people needed access to spe­cial knowledge (such as how to write html code) and special equipment (such as servers) in order to make the internet ‘work’, meaning that web-based com­munication via the internet was largely uni-directional. By 2005, however, internet technology had developed to such a point that it became possible for ordinary people to have their own websites or, perhaps more accurately, their own web ‘presences’. These days, we use sites and services such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and many others to publish our own material on the internet without giving a second thought to what makes it all happen.

What is the difference between the web and the internet? The distinction is fine but important. Basically, the internet provides the underlying archi­tecture or structure that supports the digital transfer of information. On top of this architec­ture sits the web, which is simply a platform used to deliver content via the structure of the internet. Taking it a step further, we can see that the apps that you have on your smart­phone aren’t websites but they still use the internet to transfer and present data.

The role of social media in twenty-first-century communication

The growth of social media in recent years is having quite profound impacts on how information and knowledge are created and distributed in modern culture. Whereas traditional broadcast media have been characterised by the ‘one-to-many’ control of information flows (through books, magazines, news­papers, television, etc.), social media are characterised by ‘many-to-many’ information sharing. Social media, then, are networked media and they allow for the instant and simultaneous sharing of material on the internet.

Clarifying terms There are many different terms that get thrown around when people talk about social media. There are often used interchangeably, but we can, in fact, distinguish between them: ·         IT (Information Technology). Describes the ‘inner’ workings of digital technologies – that is, things that relate to Computer Science, coding, programming, software develop­ment, hardware development, scripting, etc. ·         ICT (Information and Communication(s) Technology/-ies). Refers to technologies that facilitate the social elements of digital life and to anything that funnels the flow of com­munications between people. The key term, here, is ‘communication’. ·         Social media. Signifies digital technologies that allow users to easily create and share material with others via the internet. ·         Web 2.0. Describes the ‘shift’ or ‘evolution’ in internet technologies that occurred around 2005 when a ‘second generation’ of websites and services became available, allowing people to easily publish their own material on the web. Web 2.0 is thus closely associated with the growth of social media and is sometimes also called the ‘read-write’ web: that is, we don’t just have to read it, we can also ‘write’ it.

Why does any of this matter to you as student and/or researcher? Well, quite simply, social media are providing us with new platforms for communication and, inasmuch as communication is one of the chief activities of both study and research, social media have the potential not just to provide new tools for communication but also to change the nature of communicative practices themselves. We are seeing this already in the diversity of writing ‘genres’ that are developing through people’s use of internet-based services such as Facebook and Twitter.

As you move through this book, you will learn more about what constitutes appropriate ‘genre’ and communication practice on various social media plat­forms, but for the moment we can say that communication via social media is all about

·         Participation

·         Collaboration

·         Interactivity

·         Community building

·         Sharing

·         Networking

·         Creativity

·         Distribution

·         Flexibility

·         Customisation.

These qualities are exactly those that make social media so useful in educa­tion and research.

SOCIAL MEDIA IN STUDY AND RESEARCH

Social media are having large impacts on the way we conduct our scholarly enterprise. In particular, social media are not only helping us apply better pedagogies to our teaching and learning activities, but they are also proving beneficial at all stages of the research cycle. We will see how this works in more detail as we go through the chapters of this book; for now, though, we’ll take a more conceptual look at how social media are influencing the study and research process.

Social media and a theory of education and learning

It may seem strange to include a section on educational theory in a study and research skills textbook, but having a basic knowledge of the kinds of teach­ing, learning, and scholarship that are best supported by social media will help you to make the most of social media in your academic endeavours.

Although there are various theories about how people learn – and how they learn best – the one that has most currency in social media environments is called ‘social constructivism’. Social constructivism holds that learning is a collaborative, participatory process in which the creation of knowledge and meaning occurs through social interaction. In other words, we learn best in interaction with or when working with others. Based on this notion, it should be easy to see how social media, which so readily support collaboration and interactivity, can be harnessed to benefit not just the ways in which we learn (study), but also the ways in which we build on, interrogate, and share what we already know (research). Thus, both study and research benefit from activities that involve collaboration, participation, interaction, dissemina­tion, sharing, connecting, networking, building, and creating – activities that can be easily achieved through the use of social media.

All of this is in contrast to approaches to scholarship that focus on the monolithic, individual learner or researcher, that is, someone who operates in isolation from others and who is either the ‘receiver’ (learner) or ‘transmit­ter’ (researcher) of knowledge. Whilst there can be some value in such approaches, they are nevertheless quite static and tend to limit the opportu­nities that both students and researchers have for constructing and sharing our knowledge of the world and our place in it.

Why lecturers use social media in teaching and learning

Social media tools are nimble, flexible, easy to use and often very powerful, allowing students to easily create their own content, websites, and learning spaces. In theory, this should lead to the types of socially constructivist learn­ing approaches (mentioned above) that are student- and class-focused, rather than teacher-driven. John Dewey recognised the importance of such approaches a century ago when he stated that there should be ‘more oppor­tunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used’ (2004 [1916]: 39, emphasis removed). We can now readily create such opportunities for students because social media platforms can be used to put education at the centre – not the teacher – and thus allow stu­dents to take part more actively and creatively in their own education.

Not all lecturers, of course, use social media as part of their everyday teaching and assessment practice – in fact, most probably don’t. The use of social media in university teaching and learning is still in its early days, lead­ing many to be cynical or sceptical, others evangelistic, and perhaps most simply uninformed or indifferent. Nevertheless, as a student, you may increasingly find yourself taking courses in which the use of social media forms part of your assessment or part of the ‘delivery’ platform for basic course content. To this end, lecturers use social media for three main reasons:

1.       Education. Lecturers who use social media in their teaching typically want you to share, communicate, collaborate, participate, interact, network, connect, build community, be creative, and distribute your work/findings/discoveries in a socially constructivist learn­ing environment (see above). Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, and others are excellent for such activities. Lecturers might also want you to develop some of the tech­nical and communication skills that will be of use to you when you leave university and enter the workforce (in fact, these skills might form part of your university’s ‘graduate outcomes’) and using social media can help with that.

2.       Assessment. Many lecturers are finding social media tools more and more useful and appropriate when it comes to assessing student work. Lecturers are still discovering their way a bit in this area, but those who are working within the social constructivist models of teaching and learning described above are developing forms of assessment that combine both formative (‘as you go’) and summative (‘at the end’) assignments. It’s important to remember that lecturers working in this way are often those who have an interest in educational theory to begin with, which means that they are basing their teaching on informed pedagogy and not just on ‘what has come before’ or ‘what has always been done’. This is important for improving student learning, but if you feel that you’re not sure what it is that you have to do in order to complete your assessment, then don’t be afraid to ask your lecturer for clarification.

3.       Administration. Inasmuch as social media are geared towards the distribution of con­tent, they provide excellent platforms for the delivery of course materials, meaning that they can be used to take the place of a traditional VLE (Virtual Learning Environment – see below). Your lecturer may prefer to employ just one system or service, such as a blog, to host everything course-related, or they may work with a ‘hub and spokes’ model in which case a variety of social media tools and services (for example, Twitter, Flickr, and newsfeeds) are fed into a central platform, such as a wiki.

Precisely how specific social media tools are used for these purposes is explored in the chapters that follow.

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You can read the rest of the first chapter of Studying and Researching with Social Media and take Meg’s Social Media Competency Quiz here.