Social Media Academic Spaces

Topics
Digital learning landscape: UBC’s
virtual campus
Learning spaces: Assumptions
about teaching and learning
Social Media, Literacy practice,
knowledge production
Mixing it up in hybrid spaces

Thursday, March 25, 2010

UBC Digital
Landscape

Dual Mode Institution (Campus and Distance Education)
History of Innovation: BCNet, UPortal, WebCT, Kuali, Medical
expansion program, Ike Barber Learning Centre
One of ﬁrst campus-wide wireless networks in North America


UBC: Applications/Servers/Learning Platforms
Others
Nascent Enterprise (Not comprehensive)

myUBC
Institutional Repositories
Recognized Enterprise Systems CoursEval

TeachEval (Campus-wide) MediaWiki
CTConnect
Interchange Human Clickers
CWL
Resources LMS Personal
Publishing
Student Course eLIP (course tools data app)

WordPress Multiuser
Exchange Service e-
Centre Portfolio
Course

Admin
WebWork (math homework)
(SIS) Course
Course Website
Library Finance Video conferencing
RISE Faculty Service
Dept (local and central)
Centre
Course Website
Locally supported
Community lecture capture & podcasting
Websites
Externally Hosted Services Locally hosted
Course Websites

iTunes Grant agencies iTunesU Locally hosted Media
Management & Streaming
Google
(YouTube, Blogger) Facebook Publisher Tools Scholarly Databases Turnitin
Locally hosted discipline-based
Teaching Web Apps
2nd Life Flickr Homework systems RefWorks Wimba

Personal “Vendor-Faculty” University Department Websites


Learning Spaces - Affordances/Constraints


Interaction and Interface

Who is “in charge”?
Who has the ability to write/speak?
Who has the tools to design?
Who decides on the structure/content of materials and
activities?
Who decides what is private and what is public?


Social Media - wikipedia
Information content created by people using highly
accessible and scalable publishing technologies. It is
intended to facilitate communications, inﬂuence interaction
between peers and with public audiences. This is typically
done via the Internet and mobile communications networks.
The term most often refers to activities that integrate
technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and
the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

This interaction, and the manner in which information is
presented, depends on the varied perspectives and
"building" of shared meaning among communities, as people
share their stories and experiences.


Classrooms without Walls
Despite appearances, our classrooms have been
fundamentally changed. There is literally something in
the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of
over one billion people and computers networked
together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of
new information per second. While most of our
classrooms were built under the assumption that
information is scarce and hard to ﬁnd, nearly the entire
body of human knowledge now ﬂows through and
around these rooms in one form or another, ready to
be accessed by laptops, cell phones, and iPods.


Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-
down authoritative knowledge of the
teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of
ubiquitous digital information where
knowledge is made, not found, and
authority is continuously negotiated through
discussion and participation. In short, they
tell us that our walls no longer mark the
boundaries of our classrooms.
Michael Wesch (2007)


The Social Turn
Social Media
Read/Write Web
Afﬁnity Groups
Multimodal Environments

Participatory Culture
Knowledge & Authority:
Continuously Negotiated
Collective Intelligence

Students

Photo credit: UBC Library Graphics

Student Use of Technology
0 25 50 75 100

Own Computer

University Websites

Campus CMS

Texting

VoIP

Music/Videos

2009 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology (30,616
students from 115 US and Canadian institutions)


Student Use of Technology
0 22.5 45 67.5 90

Social Media

Upload Videos

Wikis

Weblogs

Podcasts

Social Academic
2009 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology (30,616
students from 115 US and Canadian institutions)


Digital Divide(s)
While many faculty members are technologically literate,
routinely using computer resources in research and
teaching, most did not grow up in the digital culture
common to many of their N-Gen students. As a result,
while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia,
online social networking, and routine multitasking, their
professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a
time, and as an individual activity that is centred largely
around printed text.
Mabrito and Medley (2008) “Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read:
Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts”


Digital Divide(s)


Moral Panic!
MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth
culture of digital narcissism, open-source
knowledge sharing sites like Wikipedia are
undermining the authority of teachers in the
classroom; the YouTube generation are more
interested in self-expression than in learning about
the insider world; the cacophony of anonymous
blogs and user-generated content is deafening
today’s youth to the voices of informed experts
and professional journalists; kids are so busy self-
broadcasting themselves on social networks that
they no longer consume the creative work of
professional musicians, novelists, or ﬁlmmakers.
Keen (2007). The Cult of the Amateur


Pedagogization of digital literacy practices
Sequential activity is dominant, and everyone follows the
same sequential path.

Asynchronous communication is primary to synchronous
communication (e.g., e-mail or web searching is more
“schooled” than instant messaging).

Public social spaces, including the Internet, must be
bracketed for student use; school needs to produce
kindergartens of public spaces for students to understand
them, learn within them, and be safe within them.

Material print texts and print spaces (the built environment) are
primary and are authorized, while virtual texts are
unauthorized and supplemental. Photo Credit:
kodamakitty
The Internet is primarily tool for information rather than a tool
for communication. Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT’s) are primarily “IT’s” in school.

Leander (2006) “You won’t be needing your laptops today”:
Wired bodies in the wireless classroom.”

Photo credit: vaXzine

“A whole range of cultural resources fail to be translated
into cultural capital in the school system”
Merchant (2007)


TV Generation Net Generation
“...only a tiny
trickle of the
information ﬂow
into the student
mind can be
accounted for in
the classroom.”

McLuhan, 1969


Social Media - wikipedia
identity formation
Information content created by people using highly
accessible and scalable publishing technologies. It is

•
intended to facilitate communications, inﬂuence interaction
between peers and with public audiences. This is typically
done via the Internet and mobile communications networks.
status negotiation
The term most often refers to activities that integrate
technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and

•
the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

peer-to-peer
This interaction, and the manner in which information is
presented, depends on the varied perspectives and
"building" of shared meaning among communities, as people
sociality
share their stories and experiences.


Networked Publics
Rather than conceptualize everyday media engagement as
“consumption” by “audiences,” the term “networked
publics” places the active participation of a distributed
social network in producing and circulating culture and
knowledge in the foreground. The growing salience of
networked publics in young people’s everyday lives is an
important change in what constitutes the social groups and
publics that structure young people’s learning and identity.
Digital Youth Project (2008)


New Literacy Practice:
participatory, collaborative and distributed
The more a literacy practice privileges participation over
publishing, distributed expertise over centralized
expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive
intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship,
dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership,
experimentation over “normalization,” innovation and
evolution over stability and ﬁxity, creative-innovative rule
breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over
information broadcast, and so on, the more we should
regard it as a “new” literacy. New technologies enable and
enhance these practices, often in ways that are stunning
in their sophistication and breathtaking in their scale.”
Lankshear and Knobel (2006)

New Literacy Practice:
participatory, collaborative and distributed

“Book- and print-based literacies, and the industrial
model of schooling built around book culture, are no
longer wholly adequate in a changing information,
social, and cultural environment. In light of the
accelerated shift toward electronically mediated
communication and social exchange in almost all
facets of everyday life, there is a need for an expanded
form of literacy.”
Carmen Luke (2000)


Dominant educational institutions –
from Socratic dialogical circles, to
medieval monasteries and
universities, to the industrial-era
school – do not have outstanding
track records engaging with new
communications technologies. This
is in part because curriculum and
teaching tend to be deﬁned in terms
of mastery of and engagement with
dominant modes of information,
whether of spoken language and
gesture, inscription and print, or
visual image. Simply, the domination
of pedagogy by mode of information
may prove harder to displace than
any particular political or sociocultural
ideology.

Carmen Luke (2003)

intertextual
participatory collaborative
multimodal
distributed
mobile Informal

Learning 2.0 .1.0? social
hybrid
networked peer to peer

convergent
recombinative
pervasive


Learning Spaces
Increasingly Multimodal: text, graphics, audio, video
Asynchronous and Synchronous
From broadcast to dialogue/interaction across all modes
(not just text)
Hybrid: Formal and informal sites for learning
Students as producers of knowledge, not just
consumers of content: students and teachers have
equal access to meaning making tools
Knowledge building across multiple years and beyond
programs


Learning Spaces


Student directed seminar/site


ETEC 510 Student Responses...
I found the creation of the wiki far more creative than a
traditional essay. Because of that aspect, I was willing to put
more work into the wiki as I was enjoying what I did and
really liked seeing it on the computer.

The other observation I have, as a student, is that for the
ﬁrst time I can think of, I had a desire to add to other
people’s work. I never got around to it due to time
constraints, but I often came across something and would
think to myself “oh, this would ﬁt well with so-and-so’s
topic”. I also found being able to watch other pages being
built spurred me on to do more on my space.

ETEC 510 Student Responses...

As a teacher, I have been amazed at what my 12 year-olds
were able to do with their wiki project. Each student had a
partner from the other class, so at no time were they able to
work side-by-side on the wiki – yet the cooperation and
problem solving they showed went far beyond what I expected.
Many students worked far harder than they would have done
on a regular class project and they all felt proud of what they
had accomplished. Like me, they all liked the ability to see what
their peers were doing and many contributed to more than just
their own wiki.


intertextual
participatory collaborative
multimodal
distributed
mobile Informal

Learning 2.0.1.0? social
hybrid
networked peer to peer

convergent
recombinative
pervasive


[S]udden extensions of communications are
reﬂected in cultural disturbances.
Innis (1947)

jeff.miller@ubc.ca


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