1. Social Media Meets Learning:
Transforming Pedagogies in Higher
Education
EvrimBaran, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor @ Middle East Technical University
Ankara, Turkey
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8. Discrepancy between educational
settings and everyday life
• Analog to digital
• Tethered to mobile
• Isolated to connected
• Generic to personal
• Consumers to creators
• Closed to open
(Wiley and Hilton, 2009)
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13. Social media
“a group of Internet-
based applications that
build on the ideological
and technological
foundations of Web 2.0,
and that allow the
creation and exchange of
user-generated content.”
Definition from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Image from:
http://www.isteconnects.org/otherpics/social
16. Background
• Connectivism(Siemens, 2005; Downes, 2008),
• Social networking (Boyd & Ellison, 2007),
• New media literacies and participatory culture
(Jenkins et al., 2006; Richardson, 2008),
• Creative commons, Web 2.0 and social
collaboration environments, learning Space
Mashups (Lamb, 2007; Wheeler, 2009),
• Dj culture, edupunks, open educational
resources and open access
(Yuan, MacNeil&Kraan, 2008).
17. What is participatory culture?
• Low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement
• Strong support for creating and sharing one’s
creations with others
• Some type of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
• Members believe that their contributions
matter
• Members feel some degree of social connection
with one another.
18. Connectivism, A Theory of Personal Learning
• Connectivism
•Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
•Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information
sources.
•Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate
continual learning.
•Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all
connectivist learning activities.
•Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn
and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a
shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow
due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
19. What Does Social Media Offer for
Education?
• Self-expression
• Sharing enthusiasm,
common interests
• Access to experts
• Connectedness
• Anytime anywhere
learning
• Build and share skills
• Reach people around the
world
• Participate in the
communities of learning
20. •Course content hub • Creating a course
•Editing pages community with a course
collaboratively hash tag
•Contributing to the • Sharing resources
course content on social • Communicating with
media outside experts
•Sharing class daily • Backchannel conversation
activities Social with remote guest speakers
•Sharing course schedule Course Wiki: Networking: • Communicating course
•Sharing course projects Pbworks Twitter & requirements and
Facebook reminders
and presentations
Social
Course Blog:
Bookmarking:
Edublogs
Diigo
•Online course •Online course discussions
discussions •Reflections on social media
•Reflections on social topics
media topics •Critical reviews of the course
•Critical reviews of concepts
the course concepts
21. Course Platforms
Course Blog Course Wiki
reflect, comment, discuss, collaborate, comment,
share contribute, analyze, organize
http://socialmedialearning.edublogs.org/ http://socialmedialearning.pbworks.com/
Social Bookmarking Course Tweets
share, reflect, comment share, comment, participate
communicate
http://groups.diigo.com/group/ci593_b #ci593b
22. Using wiki as a course management
platform
http://socialmedialearning.pbworks.com/
23. Creating a collective resource
repository with social bookmarking
http://groups.diigo.com/group/ci593_b
24. Using class blog as a reflection and
discussion space
http://socialmedialearning.edublogs.org
25. Social networking for extending the
classroom interaction:
• Twitter course hash tag: #ci593b
• Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/9U82U3
26. SOCIAL MEDIA FINAL PROJECT
• Best Practices for a Successful Faculty Social
Media Presence
• Thinkingmachine.pbworks.com
• Harvard Law School Weblogs Terms of Use
• IBM Social Computing Guidelines
• Intel Social Media Guidelines
• Vanderbilt University Social Media Handbook
• Frances Howell School District Social Media
Guidelines
27. What were your favorite
experiences in the course?
“The connections I made during this class
with other teachers across the state was
wonderful. Getting the Van Meter
superintendent in to talk help immensely in
this area. I do have a much better idea of
how SM can be used effectively in
schools. I also enjoyed getting exposed to
lots of new SM tools”
28. What could we do differently to improve upon
this course’s format or concept?
“I think social networks are so
inherently complex that focus upon
clarifying the expectations and
guidelines would go a long way to
making class easier to keep up with”
• A central list of readings
• A central list of activities
• A central list of resources
• want to.
29. If there is anything else you'd like to
tell us about your experiences in
this course, please feel free to do so.
“It would be good to keep the
discussion going- to talk about our
works and our progress”
I am sure some of you already googled your name. I do it once a while and I believe that it is a critical exercise for us to be able to track out digitial activities. If you google mine, you will come across with these digital spaces where I interact. My personal webpage and social networks where I interact with my colleagues and other websites where I share resources on educational technology.
Higher education have embraced online education as an opportunity to meet diverse needs of students. The college 2020 predictrs that students will demand more online courses in near future. There are growing number of nontraditional students and working professionals. Instituions started making their course content publicly available. Stanford Artificalintellgigenmce course was offered free online and attracted 58 000 students around the world.
If you do another quick google search this time using the google images option with keywords teacher, technology, cartoon, you will see these kind of cartoos where teachers are represented as confused people who are having hard tim connecting to the learners of digital age. They are mostly in front of a blackboard, or traditional classroom tools or like in this one an online teacher having a nightmare with 736 new messages. These are really demonstating the way the relatinship between technology and teacher perceived in a society.Despite this rapid growth in the use of and demand for online technologues in higher eduication, distinct pedagogies for online learning have not yet emerged. Faculty may find it difficult to move something new when the patterns of behavior for success are not fully established.
“[W]e have designed and used LMSs ... to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model.”
“[W]e have designed and used LMSs ... to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model.”
Educators around the world are creating open educational resources and contributing to the body of knowledge building upon the existing and evolving collective knowledge. Fired up with this mission, this course was designed to provide educators an extensive resource on social media and social media pedagogies shared under a Creative Commons license- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike”.
The massive online activity in the social media platforms can create “avalanche o information that feels absolutely overwhelming” (Richardson, p. 71). This is particulatly an important issue in educational environments on social media when the purpose is not t overwhelm the learner but help them learn with the capabilities of these tools. To overcome the excessive communication and participation in several social media platforms used in this course, students were introduced with course RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds of the course platforms such as blog, wiki, Twitter and Diigo, aggregators (feed collectors) such as Google Reader, and personalized dashboards such as igoogle, pageflakes, and netvibes. Using these, students were able to keep track of the class interaction in various platforms in efficient and organized way. Moreover, the course wiki was designed in a way that the widgets of different platforms such as Twitter and Diigo were embedded on the side bar, collecting the current interaction and latest content from each tool and displaying them as part of the wiki site.
A class blog was created on the Edublogs where users were added as blog authors. The blog included students’ discussions on various topics related to social media, their reflections on the use of social media tools in their own educational settings and instructor’s reflections related to the class sessions. The blog was designed as a platform to create an interactive discussion environment where students expressed their opinions and commented on each other’s posts.
