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.
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.
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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.
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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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