Michael Netzley's recent presentation to AACSB about how social media is an ideal tool for supporting participant-centered learning. Phoenix, Arizona November 2008

1. Educating Gen Y:
How Collaborative
Technologies Foster
Participant-Centered Learning
Michael Netzley, PhD

2. Lenovo’s Mary Ma on Education
Regarding the acquisition and
integration of IBM, Mary Ma noted
how education socialized employees
in ways that impacted their job
performance for decades. Passive
education translated into passive
workplace tendencies, and
opportunities to improve the M&A
process were missed when initiative
was not taken.
McKinsey Interview Here

3. Education 2.0: The Key Points
Goals Overlap
Constituency—Digital Natives
Faculty Adoption of Technology
Technology a Competitive Advantage?

4. What If Your Student Submitted This?

5. Food Review on Student Blog

6. Our Reviewer

7. Data Surrounding the Poutine Review
• Amelia’s Blog Post: 318 views
• Amelia’s Blog averages 195 views per day
• Amelia’s Highest Views: 417 in one day
• Amelia’s Total Views: 54,126 in 10 months
• YouTube: 136 views in two months
• Daryl’s Blog: averages 110 visits per day
• Daryl’s: Best day ever was 902 visits
• Daryl’s Total Views: 41,399

8. Comparing PCL to Social Media
Participant- Social Media’s
Centered Learning Strengths
• Students take greater • Decentralized; user-
responsibility generated content
• More student-to-student • Can link and share in any
interaction direction
• Responsive to student • Ability to comment, vote,
currents contribute, and more
• Faculty facilitate and ask • Self-regulated or, at most,
moderated

9. Stepping Back: Web 1.0 and 2.0
• Largely static
page
• Read only
• One-way
communication
• Before dot-com
bust
– Technology
– Behaviors

10. Stepping Back: Web 1.0 and 2.0
• Interactive
• Read/Write
Web
• Dynamic UGC
• Web control
decentralized
– Technology
– Behavior

11. Meet Gen Y
http://www.genythinktank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/esfacebook.jpg

12. Who Is Gen Y?
• Millennials born 1982 – 2000
• “The Connected Generation”
• Have ideas and want to voice them
• Want to understand underlying rationale
• Want to make a difference
• Lofty goals and dreams—believe these will be
achieved
• Can be direct; state openly what they desire
• Communication preferences (next slide)
Communication World, March-April 2008

13. Socializing a Digital Native
• The average college grad starting work
– 5,000 hours of video games on average
– 250,000 email, instant, and text messages
– 10,000 hours of hand phone use
– 3,500 hours of time on-line
• “Today’s younger workers are not
little us-es.”
Pew Research, Digital Natives Invade the Workplace, 2006

14. Gen X Gen Y
Style Not-so-serious; irreverent Eye-catching; fun
Content Get to the point—what do If and when I need, I
I need to know? will look it up online
Context Relevance to what Relevance to now,
matters to me today, and my role
Attitude Question authority; cynics OK with authority that
and skeptics earns their respect
Tactics Online; some face-to-face Online; wired;
meetings, games, tech. seamlessly connected
Speed Immediate; when I need it Five minutes ago
Frequency Whenever Constant

15. A Network of Weak Ties:
Learning Beyond the Firewall

16. Example: Course Wiki Going Global

18. Evolution of Weak Tie Thinking
Weakly ties individuals see each other infrequently and their
relationships are casual rather than intimate.
- M. S. Granovetter, 1983
Heavy email users us email in conjunction with other media to
maintain a relatively large number of weak ties.
- Pew Research, 2004
Enterprise social networking software lets our prototypical
knowledge worker stay in touch with a large network of
colleagues, allowing her to keep up to date with that they're
doing, working on, and producing. It also lets her tell this
network what she's up to.
- Andrew McAfee, HBS, 2007

19. Why Does A Global Network Enhance
Student Learning?
• Leverage: Larger networks of weak and strong
ties enhance the learning opportunity
– Faculty in perfect position to grow strong ties
• Motivation: Students love connecting with and
learning from professionals around the globe
• Constructivist Process: Students recognize
they are creating something new
• Experience: They succeed using social media

20. Decentralized Learning

21. Wikitexts: PCL Behind the Firewall
• Students write their own textbook on the wiki
• Peer-editing and faculty feedback guide revision
• Constructivist and partially decentralized model
where students create their knowledge exchange

22. What’s the Most Important Question?
Where in the learning
process do we have
what Clayton
Christensen calls
“nonconsumption?”

24. What the Research Says
• Preliminary finding that student learning
improves when students are asked to co-
create a wikitext
– Wikibooks in Higher Education: Empowerment Through Online
Distributed Collaboration by Ravid, Kalman, and Rafaeli. Computers in
Human Behavior (24) 2008.
• Study of writing instruction found no
statistically significant difference between
expert and peer feedback when more than
six peers offered instructive feedback
– The Impact of Two Types of Peer Assessment on Students’ Performance
and Students’ Performance and Satisfaction within a Wiki Environment by
Yun and Lucking. Internet and Higher Education. (2008)

25. Gartner’s Hype Cycle

26. Gartner’s Hype Cycle 2008

27. Quickly compare where you
university, faculty, and administrators
might generally fall along the hype-
cycle continuum, and where might
your students, recruiters, and other
stakeholders fall?

28. So What’s the Problem?

29. What the Research Says
• “Some faculty members feel that some Web 2.0
technologies could improve students’
learning…few choose to use them.”
• Faculty attitude and perceived behavioral control
are strong predictors of [faculty] intention to use
Web 2.0
– Admin should focus on perceived usefulness and ease of use
– Faculty need to feel confident using the technologies
– Best practices models are needed
Investigating Faculty Decisions to adopt Web 2.0 Technologies:
Theory and empirical Tests. Internet and Higher Education. (2008)

30. Case Study: Michael’s Classroom
• Co-create knowledge on wikis
• Read about current events and big ideas
(e.g., codes of conduct) with RSS feeds
• Update each other with brief interactions
by instant messenger
• Increase experiential learning through
blogging and podcast production
• Build global networks for learning,
discussion, and feedback

31. Collecting Content with RSS
• Everyone creates a
Google Reader
account
• We have 12 common
feeds for the class
• Students find their
own feeds for project
• 24/7, off and on-line
updates for class

32. Here is What It Looks Like

33. Google Reader Shared Feeds

34. RSS Pushed to Facebook
Feedheads
Application

35. What the Research Says: Facebook
• Faculty Facebook pages do not appear to have
a significant positive or negative impact on
student ratings
– 66% student respondents felt it was acceptable for
faculty to be on Facebook
– 33% raised privacy or identity issues—concern that
their page may negatively impact faculty perception of
that student (unaware of privacy controls?)
• Positive responses suggest that students like
getting to know faculty better
• Trade-offs: some loss of control over self-
presentation for faculty and students
Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and student/Faculty
Relationships on Facebook. Hewitt & Forte, 2006.

36. Online = Available to Chat

37. Michael’s Blog

38. Faculty Blog: Economics

39. Faculty Blog and Podcast: Law

40. Faculty Blog: Organizational Behavior

41. Faculty Podcast: Leadership Matters

42. How Media Creates Content

43. How Students Create Content

44. Faculty Example: Kansas State

45. My Business Card