Undoubtedly, the most alluring aspect about social
media is the ability to share with and connect to others from around the world.
Within seconds, a message, a post, a video can be shared with thousands of
users. These networks allow anyone with a keyboard or smartphone to participate
in the building and sharing of a collective knowledge. As a result, the
participatory nature of social media inherently encourages users to be active
and engaged. As Bjork emphasizes, we should be “taking advantage of the power
of collaborative interactions to enrich the encoding of information and concepts”
(421). In view of this, how can we as
educators incorporate this same element into our curriculums in order to create
similar shared-learning frameworks?
Education, as it stands right now, is a very
individual process, and perhaps it’s time to take a more social and inclusive approach
to learning. Social media facilitates the inclusion of students’ outside
interests into the formal classroom, thereby creating a more authentic and
contextualized environment and closing the gap between in-school and
out-of-school learning. Furthermore, social media also facilitates student participation
by allowing them to be responsible content generators for their courses. Talk
about personalized learning! This sense of inclusivity and accountability has
the potential to foster deeper connections between students and their peers, as
well as to their own learning processes. With the reduced number of RLOs in the
new BC curriculum, this is the
opportunity to allow students to take the driver’s seat in their own education.
In addition to supporting the co-construction of a
shared knowledge, social media also provides a platform for that knowledge to
be challenged. Students are already participating in this type of interaction
via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Mandviwalla, executive director of the
Institute for Business and Information technology at Temple University, writes:
The new generation of students is characterized by
ad-hoc communication, multi-tasking, and collaborative work interspersed with
collaborative play. Their lebenswelt (lifeworld) is social, mobile, open, and
defined by ubiquitous access to and use of information. In this environment,
everybody is a content generator (posts and comments) and aggregator (searches,
activity feeds, and tags) (Chacko, 53).
At countless moments throughout their day, youth are being
challenged by a wave of new information every time they use social media. Although
students may still need more training when it comes to critical thinking and
judgement of information found online, they are well on their way to being
expert navigators and contributors to our shared knowledge.
It is my hope
that I will be able to facilitate learning that is “social, mobile, and open”
for my students, if Twitter is the best platform for this – then that’s what
I’ll consider using (or at least trying!). On that note, I have also been
reading rave reviews of what student blogs can do for enhancing learning. For
the teacher who wants to play it safe, there are secure networks, such as Edmodo, which have the look and feel of
a social media site but that allow the educator executive control. At the end
of the day, I want to be able to help students connect with their peers, with
me, with their lives outside school, with the world, and with their learning –
if I can accomplish all that then I’ll be a happy teacher.
Social media is
all about the connections, but then again, so is learning. So how do we put two
and two together? The frameworks are there for us, we just need to know how to
apply them. As a pre-service teacher, I certainly can’t say that I have ANY of
the answers – but I am willing to take a few risks in order to find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment