Social Media and Education

Now the Dust Has Settled

Neil Selwyn, Eve Stirling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351349253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Social media are now established as an important aspect of contemporary education. We live in times where social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Snapchat are mainstream educational tools; where most new educational technologies claim to have a 'social' element; and it increasingly makes no sense to distinguish between learning 'online' and 'offline'. It studies users' experiences and views of social media; addresses questions of equality and diversity concerning who is doing what with social media; examines how the use of social media applications sits alongside pre-existing cultures and structures of schooling; and brings to light the unintended and unexpected results of social media in education. Altogether, this collection of writing provides a nuanced and interesting discussion of the realities of social media use across different aspects of education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning, Media and Technology.

Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning

Christine Greenhow and Cathy Lewin

It is argued that social media has the potential to bridge formal and informal learning through participatory digital cultures. Exemplars of sophisticated use by young people support this claim, although the majority of young people adopt the role of consumers rather than full participants. Scholars have suggested the potential of social media for integrating formal and informal learning, yet this work is commonly under-theorized. We propose a model theorizing social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Through two contrasting case studies, we apply our model together with social constructivism and connectivism as theoretical lenses through which to tease out the complexities of learning in various settings. We conclude that our model could reveal new understandings of social media in education, and outline future research directions.

Introduction

Technological advancements and pedagogies that emphasize learners as co-producers of knowledge (Selwyn 2011) have contributed to people’s adoption of the term social media to indicate websites and online applications that enable users to create and participate in various communities through functions such as communicating, sharing, collaborating, publishing, managing, and interacting (Mao 2014; Social media, n.d.). Typical social media features promote individual users through profile pages (e.g., displaying likes, comments, recommendations). Social media features include interconnections with other users through links and news feeds, and sharing of user-generated content (e.g., photos, ratings, tags). Pages can be dynamically updated and content embedded (e.g., embedding a video). Examples of social media include social network sites (e.g., Facebook); wikis (e.g., wikispaces); media-sharing services (e.g., YouTube); blogging tools (e.g., Blogger); micro-blogging services (e.g., Twitter); social bookmarking (e.g., Delicious); bibliographic management tools (e.g., Zotero); and presentation-sharing tools (e.g., Slideshare) (Gruzd, Staves, and Wilk 2012).

It has been argued that educators would benefit from ‘a stronger focus on students’ everyday use of and learning with Web 2.0 technologies in and outside of classrooms (Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes 2009, 255). Others argue that only a small proportion of young people are actually using social media in sophisticated ways that educators might value (Eynon and Malmberg 2011; Ito et al. 2008). Complicating this tension, there is a lack of current models that theorize social media as a space for informal learning. There is also considerable debate about the benefits and challenges of appropriating technologies (e.g., social media) in everyday use for learning and little exploration of the connections between formal, non-formal, and informal learning such technologies might facilitate.

In this paper, we draw on relevant theory, prior literature and our own research in Europe and the USA to suggest a model that theorizes social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Using ideas derived from social constructivism and connectivism as promising initial lenses through which to conceptualize social media and learning, this paper problematizes ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ across multiple contexts, illustrating the complex relationships between formal, non-formal, and informal learning. It considers research projects from two regions focusing on young people’s uses of social media tools to support these varied forms of learning. Because our studies involve participants of varying ages, including teenagers and college-age youth, we refer to ‘education’ broadly as spanning school and higher education contexts. We revisit the debate about social media, or ‘social software’ in education to suggest how this model illuminates current tensions and suggests new opportunities for research and innovation.

Research on social media in education

The educational benefits of appropriating social media into learning contexts are contested. Research on social media in education suggests that integrating social media in learning and teaching environments may yield new forms of inquiry, communication, collaboration, identity work, or have positive cognitive, social, and emotional impacts (Gao, Luo, and Zhang 2012; Greenhow, Burton, and Robelia 2011; Greenhow and Robelia 2009a, 2009b; Pimmer, Linxen, and Grohbiel 2012; Ranieri, Manca, and Fini 2012). For instance, research on learning and social network sites (e.g., Facebook) in particular has suggested their affordances for interaction, collaboration, information, and resource sharing (Mazman and Usluel 2010); encouraging participation and critical thinking (Mason and Rennie 2007; Ajjan and Hartshorne 2008); increased peer support and communication about course content and assessment (DiVall and Kirwin 2012); inter-cultural language learning (Mills 2011); and their positive effects on the expression of identities and digital literacies, particularly for marginalized groups (Manca and Ranieri 2013).

On the other hand, researchers have warned against leveraging social media for learning. Kirschner and Karpinski (2010) found that time spent on Facebook negatively affected college grades. Similarly, Junco and Cotton (2013) examined how students multitask with Facebook and found that using Facebook while doing schoolwork was negatively associated with their overall grade point average. Students’ use of social media in extracurricular activities was found to be distractive to learning, especially among weaker students (Andersson et al. 2014). Finally, students were less willing to appropriate social media as a formal learning tool, preferring it for course-related communication (Prescott, Wilson, and Beckett 2013) or using it largely for socializing and non-academic purposes (Selwyn 2009).

Despite a growing body of work concerned with social media and ‘informal learning’, ‘there has been little serious attention to the form or nature of that learning’ (Merchant 2012, 16) or the interrelationship with formal learning (Cox 2013). Many studies consider appropriation of social media within ‘formal’ and/or ‘informal’ learning, but in most cases, these terms are under-theorized or treated as binary conditions, which oversimplify the complexities of the actual learning contexts today’s youth inhabit. Some researchers suggest that appropriating social media can facilitate ‘seamless’ integration across learning situations integrating formal and informal learning (Dabbagh and Kitsantas 2012). Others highlight the challenges of appropriation (Crook 2012). Adopting a more ‘principled approach’ to understanding these tensions and interrelationships is especially important in light of recent technological developments, policy initiatives, changing teacher and faculty demographics, and the realities of young people’s access to social media. As described in more detail below, these converging trends suggest that it may be more useful and realistic to theorize social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality.

Theorizing social media as a space for learning

Social constructivism and connectivism are promising initial lenses through which to conceptualize social media and learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Social constructivism draws on the idea that learning is situated in the context of circumstances, activity or culture. What is known resides not only in the individual, a position advanced by cognitive constructivists, but also in the collaboration and interaction among many (Vygotsky 1978; Windshitl 2002). Conceptually, social media practices seem well aligned with social constructivist views of learning as participation in a social context and values of knowledge as decentralized, accessible, and co-constructed among a broad base of users (Dede 2008); ‘knowledge’ may become ‘collective agreement’ that ‘combines facts with other dimensions of human experience’ (i.e., opinions, values) (Dede 2008, 80). Validity of knowledge in social media environments can be negotiated through peer review in an engaged community, and expertise involves understanding disputes and offering syntheses accepted by the community (Dede 2008).

Similarly, connectivist ideas (Siemens 2005), which view learning as the process of creating connections and articulating a network with nodes and relationships, also seems well aligned with social media practices. Connectivism can best be viewed as a developing perspective (Kop and Hill 2008) that overlaps with other more established perspectives like social constructivism; it is under-researched, but provides ‘fertile testing ground for ideas, which, in turn, may lead to empirical research’ that can then refine, validate or disprove the framework over time (Kop and Hill 2008, n.p.). Connectivism draws strength in using internet activity as a powerful and intuitive analogy for conceiving of distributed learning through networks; if learning transpires via connections to nodes on the network, then perhaps the maximization of learning can be understood by studying the properties of effective networks (Kop and Hill 2008). From the connectivist perspective, being knowledgeable can be seen as the ability to nurture, maintain, and traverse network connections; to access and use specialized information sources just-in-time; and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Social media and education . . . now the dust has settled
• 1. Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning
• 2. New literacies practices of teenage Twitter users
• 3. Using Facebook as a co-learning community in higher education
• 4. Self-regulated learning and social media – a ‘natural alliance’? Evidence on students’ self-regulation of learning, social media use, and student–teacher relationship
• 5. Technology, time and transition in higher education – two different realities of everyday Facebook use in the first year of university in the UK
• 6. Engagement in structured social space: an investigation of teachers’ online peer-to-peer interaction
• 7. Online content creation: looking at students’ social media practices through a Connected Learning lens
• 8. Student Facebook groups as a third space: between social life and schoolwork
• Index