Social media in higher education teaching and learning

Vivienne BozalekUniversity of the Western Cape

vbozalek@uwc.ac.za

Blogging

Facebook

Linkedin

Twitter

The social network

My Space

Google Plus

FlickrVimeo

Digital Media

RSS Feeds

MobileTechnology

The Student

Filtering, analyzing, accepting , rejecting information from the network knowledge nodes, but also seeding

back into the nodes and creating

Regulated environment (Teacher involvement)

Traditional Information

StaticWebsites

Creating connections (patterns) between ideas and concepts

Learning(Personal Learning)

Growing ubiquity of social media(Johnson et al., 2014)

• Higher educators use social media (70% social & 50% professional according to Pearson) but have little knowledge of applying this to teaching and learning

• Ditto for students social media literacies in formal learning situations (tend to use it informally)

• Important for students and higher educators to understand affordances and challenges of different social media for teaching and learning (Bower, 2008)

Issues to consider

Emerging Technologies course

Mission: Four institutions convening a single module for educators drawn from these institutions with a shared goal of modeling teaching with emerging technologies to improve teaching & learning practices.

disrupting existing institutional practices

The South African higher education landscape is still affected by the historical inequities of past policies, and many students and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), particularly

the Historically Disadvantaged Institutions (HDIs) are affected by scarce resources and poverty. Higher education institutions themselves are also unequally placed with regard

to resources and the students that they enroll (Bozalek & Boughey, 2012)

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Challenges facing SA HEIs

• Too much time wasted in reinventing the wheel - in Silos

• Best practices are 'locked up' in walls and not shared

Why we did it

Objective: to create a conducive learning space where participants could be free to share ideas and experiences with peers and facilitators from other HEIs.

What we did

Source: http://checet.blogspot.com/

We did not want to teach colleagues but

wanted them to learn, not to learn

about tools but how to teach with tools

So…We de-emphasised teaching to foreground learning and de-emphasised tools and emphasised practice

Methodology

Meaningful learning and interaction

Theory-based design framework

Pedagogical Model

Learning Strategies

Pedagogical tools

Theory: a tightly coupled relationship between pedagogical model (learning objective), learning strategies (activities) and pedagogical tools (appropriate technologies) is required for meaningful learning (Adapted from: Dabbagh, 2005)

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All four participating institutions each had a different LMS which meant that for some participants:

i) the LMS was new to them, ii) experiences might not be meaningful in their respective

contexts

We decided to focus on cloud-based tools. So re-designed to model best practices for empowering educators on teaching with emerging technologies.

What we learnt quickly

Cloud-based tools

Generic tools become pedagogical tools when wrapped around pedagogy and learning strategies

● ‘Infrastructure constraints’ hinders the real time communication (digital divide),

● not all social media is suitable for teaching and learning, and

● facilitation and monitoring can be challenging

Disadvantages of using connectivist tools?

Key Findings of study of higher educators at PGDip course

● It is difficult to separate the ‘personal’ from ‘learning’,

● some social media tools offer a better platform for ‘the personal’ than for ‘the learning’, and

Key Findings (cont.)

‘Personal’ vs. ‘Learning’?

Framework and cognitive

engagement in connectivist

learning

Wang, Z, Chen, L. & Anderson, T. (2014).

ALT survey on use of tech

• Lack of staff time and support• Lack of support at senior level• Lack of leadership in effective use of technology• Lack of incentives• Lack of funding for technologies• Reliance on certain individuals • (Laurillard & Deepwell, 2014)

• Support teachers as active, collaborative action researchers

• Encourage and support use in teaching• Build in time for teacher development• Leaders at all levels to take part in strategic approach• Develop sustainable, education-oriented IT infrastructure• Recognise and reward innovation• Engage students in active learning (Laurillard &

Deepwell, 2014)

ALT survey encouraging use

• How much control does the teacher have using social media?

• ‘Fit for purpose’• E.g. use of Twitter in teaching and learning - use

hashtags for conversations• Finding time to stay in touch is difficult• Resistance to mixing social life with academic life

– perhaps have different accounts – lack of trust

Social media in teaching

• Concern of surveillance of students• Too many tools too many sites for students to put

things in • SMS good way of notifying students who should

take responsibility for change of numbers • Relationships between lecturers and students – prof

boundaries and time issues – ethical issues• How to shape the content of what is distributed –

authenticity with social media

Social media

• Lecturer as facilitator or knowledge producer – • Quality assurance of content – what responses are being

put out there• Can have a suite of things for different purposes• Cost of developing Apps is coming down• Use what the learners know and match that with

educational intentions• Concerns about who controls social media – the issue of

security – money making. People give up privacy

Social media

• Building own social media platforms for institutions or across institutions

• Can’t control everything – students are using technology to share informally anyway – challenge to manage it

• Policies should be to guide students and academics on how to use it for educational purposes – need to look also at legal aspects

Social media

• Policies to strongly support innovative pedagogies using social media – time off, professional development (Johnson et al., 2014, Stevenson & Hedberg, 2011)

• Revise the research/teaching dualism/binary (Johnson et al., 2014) expanded social SoTL (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014)

• Guidelines on how to use social media for students and academics

• Participatory, collaborative method with top-down policy development (Johnson et al., 2014)

Policy Implications for us

ReferencesGreenhow, C. & Gleason, B. (2014). Social scholarship: Reconsidering scholarly practices in the age of social media, British Journal of Educational Technology, 45 (3): 392-402.

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Laurillard, D. & Deepwell, M. (2014) ALT survey on the effective use of learning technology in educataion. Education Technology Action Group.

Seaman,J&Tinti-Kane,H. (2013). Social Media for Teaching and Learning. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions.

Social media in education: ethical concernsPosted on 01 July 2014. Tags: Changing the learning landscape, ethics, HEA, Mark Childs, social media, Steve Wheeler,Teresa MacKinnon

Stevenson, M. & Hedberg, J.G. (2011) Head in the clouds: a review ofcurrent and future potential for cloud-enabled pedagogies, Educational Media International, 48:4,321-333, DOI: 10.1080/09523987.2011.632279

Wang, Z, Chen, L. & Anderson, T. (2014). A Framework for Interaction and Cognitive Engagement in Connectivist Learning Contexts. The International Review of Open and Distance Learning, 15, 2, 121-141https://www.canvas.net/courses/introduction-to-learning-technologies