Ferris / Wilder The Plugged-In Professor

Tips and Techniques for Teaching with Social Media
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78063-342-8
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 376 Seiten

Reihe: Chandos Publishing Social Media Series

New technologies are transforming the way students work. The Plugged in Professor provides a timely and exceptional resource for using social media and other new technologies to help college students meet both general and discipline-specific objectives. The title covers techniques built around well-known social networking technologies, as well as other emerging technologies such as mobile phone and tablet apps. With a practical focus and reader-friendly format, this book shows educators how to apply techniques in each technology, and includes clear student learning objectives, step-by-step directions, observations and advice, and supplemental readings and resources. Twenty-five chapters by leading contributors cover key aspects of new technologies in education, in four parts: Writing, research and information fluency; Communication and collaboration; Critical thinking and creativity; and Integrative learning. - Provides a cutting-edge resource for academics and practitioners in effective ways of reaching today's students through the use of their favourite tool, social media - Outlines a range of strategies taking advantage of the unique learning styles and habits of net generation learners - Exposes students to ways in which these technologies can be used in their professional and personal lives

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ferris, Sharmila

Wilder, Hilary

Leseproben

Preface
We write this Preface using tools that were conjecture mere decades ago, and inconceivable just centuries ago. Reed, chalk, and quill were used for millennia; today information is routinely recorded, stored, and retrieved digitally. Although we have lived through the development of electronic media and witnessed first-hand the growth of the World Wide Web, social media were not on our radar even in the 1980s or early 1990s. As new as computer and digital technologies are, social media are even newer! (For example, MySpace and Delicious were launched in 2003, Facebook and Flickr in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Tumblr in 2007.) Social media may be new to us, but today’s classrooms are filled with a generation of students to whom social media are a way of life – and who cannot envisage a world before Internet and digital technologies. Social media usage has spread to encompass adults as well as youth – and educators are increasingly considering social media as teaching tools, both in order to more effectively reach students, and because these technologies are being used more and more in the workplaces our students will be entering. One problem that often develops with our use of social media in the classroom is that the technology, rather than the pedagogy, can become the focus of the teaching. This book puts pedagogy first, considering ways in which underlying instructional purpose can guide our use of social media. Social media and education
Before we proceed, we should define our use of the term “social media” in this book, since it has become such a popular buzzword. Social networking is the most public face of social media; in a social network such as Facebook users deepen connections by sharing thoughts, photos, links of interest, etc., and develop relationships by creating cohorts of “friends” who can then become “friend of a friend”. But in this book we do not limit our understanding of social media to social networking. With Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), we define social media as any medium enabling connectivity and interaction among users and communities. So we include wikis, blogging. and Web conferencing in our understanding of social media. In our opinion, wikis are the oldest social media (Ward Cunningham launched his wiki in 1995, with the iconic Wikipedia introduced in 2001) and perhaps have the longest history of educational application. We also include Web conferencing and blogging as electronic media that allow users to interact easily, offer quick feedback to communication, and collaborate effortlessly. Having defined social media, we should consider the question of whether social media have a place in education. The fundamental question indeed is whether social media are a relevant and useful tool for learning. The importance of social media in our lives is indisputable, and undeniably there is a growing interest among educators in the potentials of social media in the classroom. At the same time, social media are evolving so rapidly that it is a challenge to determine what works best to promote which specific learning goals. It is our opinion that while social media pose challenges for teaching and learning, they also offer opportunities that justify exploration of their affordances. Social media can expand opportunities across a wide range of higher order learning: communication, collaboration, research, information literacy, critical thinking, and creativity, among others. Social media have the potential to help our students learn at many levels. This is a potential not lightly dismissed, given the importance of social media in the lives of youth today. While estimates of time spent using social media vary, estimated use is nothing less than astounding. Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, compared to just 7.6 percent for e-mail (Nielsen, 2011). An illustrative example of the importance of social media can be seen in the use of a leading social medium, Facebook. Its use has grown from 175 million active users in January 2009 to 350 million users in 2011 (Socialbakers, 2012a) to 901 million in July 2012 (Facebook’s S-1 filings with SEC at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#cite_note-19). At the same time, every minute, ten hours of content were uploaded to the video-sharing platform YouTube (Socialbakers, 2012a). Student use of social media supports this data. While it is difficult to estimate the time students spend in social networking, one recent empirical study (Junco, 2012) found that the average time American students spent on Facebook was 106 minutes per day, although many spent more. In Western Europe most countries reached over 75 percent Internet penetration “with up to 99% of a population social networking” in Portugal (Socialbakers, 2012b). Asia has lower social media penetration, varying from above 50 percent (in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) to 3 percent in India (Richards, 2012). But social media growth in India is one of the fastest, with 20 percent growth in the past six months (Socialbakers, 2012b). Even students in the developing world with little access to computers are mobile social media users. In Africa, for example, there is 65 percent mobile penetration and 50 percent of the population is younger than 20 (http://www.oafrica.com/mobile/video-mobile-stats-for-africa-2012/). Interestingly, 4.8 million people in the world (of the approximate world population of 6 billion people) own a mobile phone, while only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush (Infographics, 2012). While the pervasiveness of social media offers significant opportunities for making learning more attractive, perhaps more important are the affordances offered by social media technologies for making learning more effective. In particular, these technologies have features that “afford” (Gibson, 1977) or support the human characteristics that facilitate learning. For example, we know that socio-collaborative instructional experiences can be used to promote deeper learning as students discuss/debate, collaborate/critique, and share with/listen to peers. Clearly, many of today’s social media (e.g., wikis, virtual chats, Web conferences, or electronic discussions) can be used to afford these socio-collaborative learning experiences by providing anytime/anywhere access to shared ideas while at the same time saving participants' dialogue, affording reflection, and allowing consideration of decision-making processes. Other technologies, such as online tagging and social-bookmarking tools, afford the mental processes involved in collecting, labeling, organizing, and aggregating information and ideas found on that globally shared knowledge space we call the Web. The educational potentials of social media, when considered in conjunction with students' attraction to social media, lead us to conclude that we should seize the opportunity and take advantage of the unique habits of our students. Careful and considered use of social media by educators becomes an important way to give larger meaning to technologies that are used primarily for social and entertainment purposes. Instructional goals and social media
The fundamental issue regarding social media use by educators is careful and considered use. The rapid growth of technologies places them in a state of high interpretive flexibility (Brent, 2005) meaning that such tools are particularly amenable to shaping by educators. This makes a pedagogical focus to social media particularly meaningful and necessary today. We feel that clear and effective instructional purpose is essential in shaping social media technologies for educational use. We agree with Halverson (2011) that goals for learning are more important than the use of any individual technology in the classroom. Too often the technology overrides pedagogy, so we strongly endorse the use of student learning outcomes as an effective way to ensure that social media are used to facilitate pedagogy. Learning outcomes are formal statements that articulate the knowledge, skills, and/or understanding that students should be able to demonstrate after instruction, and why they need to achieve these competencies. Outcomes may be based on standards set by professional organizations (e.g., teaching standards) or educational consortia (e.g., American Association of Colleges and Universities, www.aacu.org), or governmental agencies (e.g., European Parliament’s Framework for Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/publ/pdf/ll-learning/keycomp_en.pdf ) or they may be set by the course instructor, who carefully designs educational activities to ensure that students meet overall course objectives by the end of the semester. By clearly focusing on instructional purpose before selecting and utilizing social media in the classroom, educators can ensure learning by knowing what they are doing with social media, why they are doing it, and what students are learning as a result. Rationale for this book
This book was developed to provide a comprehensive resource for using social media and other new technologies to help college students meet discipline-specific and general education learning objectives. The book includes techniques and activities built around well-known social networking technologies like Facebook and YouTube, Delicious, Tumblr,...