Social media and Peer-to-Peer Learning
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The document discusses the use of social media and peer-to-peer learning. It covers topics like personal learning networks, social learning environments, and how students are using social media sites like Facebook for both social and academic purposes. It also examines challenges around privacy, ethics and the "participation gap" in digital learning environments.
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Social media and Peer-to-Peer Learning
- 1. Keith Kirkwood School of Language and Learning Victoria University Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum 15-16 November 2011 Social Media and Peer-to-Peer Learning
- 4. The social media (r)evolution http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/ I can has Web presenz!
- 6. But let’s discuss something more salubrious than the collapse of the global economic system… Hey! You! Get off of my Cloud!
- 8. Digital Natives – Prensky’s nature/nurture debate (2001) Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/armyofthelight/5118597250/ “ today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. … it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up.”
- 12. A popular example of socially-constructed knowledge
- 13. Another popular example of socially-constructed knowledge
- 14. Participating to learn Source: Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. Educause Review , 43(1), 16-32. Retrieved 14 February 2010 from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/MindsonFireOpenEducationtheLon/162420
- 15. P2P Community of Practice (after Wenger, et al. 2002) teachers students mentors core group active peripheral
- 17. Core competencies for participatory learning (New media literacies, Jenkins, et al.) Literacy Description Play The capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving Simulation The` ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes Performance The ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery Appropriation The ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content Multi-tasking The ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis Distributed cognition The ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities Collective intelligence The ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal Judgment The ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia navigation The ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities Networking The ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information Negotiation The ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives and grasping and following alternative sets of norms
- 22. JUGGLE INTERACTIONS… USE FACEBOOK TO COMMUNICATE Q20. How much do you agree with the following statements about the use of social networking sites such as Facebook in conjunction with your learning? Agreement with Statements about Social Networking Students are comfortable communicating with other students on Facebook about academics; however, they prefer their communication with instructors to be more formal (using email for this purpose instead). ©2011 EDUCAUSE. CC by-nc-nd
- 23. JUGGLE INTERACTIONS… “FRIENDING” BY AN INSTRUCTOR? Q21. Let’s say a teacher or professor wanted to “Friend” you for academic purposes. Is that appropriate? Appropriateness of Teacher or Professor “Friending” You for Academic Purposes 39% Not Appropriate Appropriate Neutral 31% 30% ©2011 EDUCAUSE. CC by-nc-nd
- 31. SNAPVU – VU in-house Social Learning Environment http://www.snap.vu.edu.au
- 32. My SNAPVU - PLE
- 33. Blogs – informal learning support
- 34. VUTube on SNAPVU
- 35. VUTube vs YouTube stats
- 36. YouTube channel comments on snapvu videos
- 37. Pilot period survey results (12/2010)
- 40. Building a Personal Learning Network Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkOKCDGE9vY
- 42. Mike Wesch’s Netvibes LMS http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography
- 43. Mike Wesch’s Netvibes LMS http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Anthro_Blogs
- 45. The social media explosion http://www.personalizemedia.com/garys-social-media-count/
- 48. Further reading about SNAPVU This paper was awarded a 2011 Outstanding Paper award by Emerald Literati Network and is available until 1 September 2011 by Emerald for viewing / downloading here: http://listmanager.emeraldinsight.com/t/20855/10623097/6992/0/ It was an Editor Pick on the September issue of The Informed Librarian website: http://www.informedlibrarian.com/ Alternatively the paper can be accessed on the Victoria University Instititutional Repository here: http://eprints.vu.edu.au/15797/
Editor's Notes
- My presentation is about the opportunities social media provides for peer learning. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Despite what the program says about this presentation I am going to stray just a little – a prerogative I am assuming since I was called upon at the final hour to deliver this talk. But I will stick close to the original topic, which is social media for teaching and learning in a tertiary context – with an emphasis on peer learning and what students are up to – or could be up to – with social media, to increase their learning potential. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Social media, as we all know, has certainly reached a state of ubiquity and influence in the world – what with its role in the Arab Spring and the Fall of America – did I say that? – I mean Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Web. But for the 99% of us who have not yet taken to the streets and the tweets, social media is still a revolution. Less than a decade ago it was difficult for the non-technical person to have a Web presence or a voice, or to add their creative impulses to the creativity on the Web – or, as Christopher Koch once said in The Year of Living Dangerously, to “add your light to the Sum of Light”. But with Web 2, this is no longer true. Click – Now everyone can haz a voice on the Web: even Lolcats. Even Paris Hilton. Click- Sydney transmedia guru Gary Hayes has provided a nice little app on one of his websites that purportedly counts discrete social media events in real time. From this screenshot you can see not only how gaudy it is but how much occurs in a 60 second timeframe: 700 thousand shared items on Facebook, over 2 million videos watched on YouTube. Every minute! I thought I’d try to get this little app going during this presentation and then check in at the end to see what kind of results we have. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And speaking of Facebook and ubiquity, now we are even getting Heads of State – in this case Silvio Berlusconi – posting his informal State of the Union address “Rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated” (plagiarising Mark Twain – which impressed me, actually). This was a day before parliamentary vote of no-confidence that convinced him to step down. “Where be your jibes now?” Your flashes of excess that were wont to set the taboids in a roar? And when heads of state start using your social networking platform, you’ve got to wonder. But perhaps he was invited by Mark Zuckerberg back in the heady Harvard days when they were rating college girls on Facemash. Surely Silvio would have enjoyed that. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- But as I say, surely many college kids must feel it’s time to find a new platform when the Faces of the Mighty – and mightily fallen – appear there. Or your chemistry professor tries to befriend you. Click – But with the tipping point of social media comes its inevitable lurch towards a downhill roll of becoming passe. You’ve heard it all before at some other conference, right? Well, I promise not to give you a slide full of Web 2 iconography in this presentation. Click - Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Damn! I thought I’d taken that out! Or to plague you with Mark Prensky’s Digital Natives ideas… Click - Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- … in which he wrote, in 2001, Click – “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. … it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up.” Click to disappear Nor will I join the nature/nurture debate that claims our kids are somehow hardwired to social media and new technologies and can multitask just as effortlessly as ADD – I mean ABC – as if they were born with headphones and ipods… Click - Though I must admit I still can’t thumb-type the way I see kids do these days. Click - Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- The study I would like to draw attention to is the Kennedy et al. research here in Australia determining that undergraduate students were in fact not big users of Web 2 technologies, nor did they use information technologies in particularly sophisticated ways. I would suggest that this study – which is still being cited today to counter claims of student’s proficiency with social technologies – is now badly in need of updating. The annual Educause ECAR studies in the US certainly indicate a growing sophistication or at least usage of Web 2.0 technologies amongst US undergraduates. -click Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Nevertheless, I want to look at social media from a teaching and learning perspective, and to keep in mind the pedagogies that should inform the use of Web 2 technologies. Because we should be clear why we are using these technologies in the first place, and what we, as educators, aim to have our learners achieve. Read quote. Click – This was Ivan Illich, 40 years ago. Click – And this… Click – Is Mike Wesch today. Both, I think, valid statements when looking at university education today. How do we bring relevance back into our student’s education? Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Web 2.0 and social media enable social constructivist activities and active learning strategies. In the old Web 1.0 days we were looking for ways to achieve this kind of e-learning, but now we can truly create affordances for our students to learn actively and socially through: - Click - Read dot points Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- For example, here is a wiki, a collaborative document. In fact it is a discussion page of a Wikipedia article – a great way for students to appreciate the very act of collaborative knowledge-making. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And here is a tagcloud from Flickr. Creating a collective ontology – a folksonomy – is an opportunity we didn’t have before Web 2.0 came along. And now, as David Weinberger writes, “Everything is Miscellaneous.” And that’s a good thing. Click- Click- Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- But this kind of collective knowledge making means that the old paradigm of teaching as knowledge transfer from expert to novice is changing. Click – We are now learning that it is important for our students to participate in the learning process. That learning is powerfully achieved when understanding is socially constructed. Click – Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- So we point to the importance of Peer to Peer learning in a Community of Practice, where we have novices learning from peer mentors who are students working with teaching staff. This diagram subverts Wenger’s original conception, however, by placing the novices at the centre of the community. As I see it, this maintains student-centredness in the model. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- So we have the 3 Ps of social learning: Peer learning Participatory learning And, while it is social in nature, It is also Personalised, because each individual has the opportunity, in a learning community, to learn In his or her own ideal ‘zone of proximal development’ Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Henry Jenkins, known best perhaps for his white paper on Participatory Culture, has articulated a set of new media literacies that he feels people need to develop in order to become competent in social media as learners and participants. Here are those literacies. Like Kennedy, he doesn’t assume that all ‘digital natives’ come equipped with these skills by virtue of their millennial birth. But these are not just traditional literacies – reading, writing, and the filling in of Austudy forms. These include things like: problem-solving, simulating, adopting alternative identities, the ability to “meaningfully sample and remix media content”, the ability to negotiate across diverse communities and respect multiple perspectives. These, according to Jenkins, are the 21 st century skills we need. I’m inclined to agree with him, so far. 11/17/11 Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- But Jenkin’s realizes that there are some challenges to overcome in order for people to become literate in a participatory context. For one, there is still a digital divide that disadvantages some students and disallows their access to participation. Secondly, are people sufficiently critically aware of how digital media is being used, and the subtleties with which they may be using them? Thirdly, we, and our students, need to consider the ethical implications of what we create and put out there, and what we consume. For example, in our attempts to remix and reuse digital information, are we sufficiently citing the original creators of ideas and artifacts? In other words, are we plagiarizing or not? Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- In order to help students through some of these issues, the New Media Literacies people have developed some open educational resources that can be used in the classroom. This package, called Our Space, is designed primarily for secondary students, but it is worth thinking how we might incorporate these issues into our tertiary curricula as well, because universities are also grappling with these issues. And there’s the website from where this resource can be downloaded. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- So it’s time to check our Facebook page again, isn’t it? Facebook for learning. Is that an oxymoron? I took a class in 2010 in Social Networking for Information Professionals, when I thought I might want to be a librarian, and we used a Facebook page as a kind of learning management system. There were a number of reasons why I didn’t think it was very effective as a learning platform, but the primary reason was that I didn’t feel the abbreviated nature of Wall posts were conducive to any kind of effective academic analysis or discussion. Click - In 2009 Neil Selwyn did a study of 900+ undergraduate Facebook Walls in which he determined that not a lot of learning took place on Facebook. In fact, it was more of a support mechanism, and here’s an interesting observation in the last dot point: that it is cool to be academically disengaged. Click- His conclusion was that Facebook was primarily about the “‘identity politics’ of being a student”. Perhaps no surprises there. Click- Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- But the latest Educause Centre for Applied Research study, that came out last month, suggests that students are perhaps increasingly using Facebook for ‘learning purposes’. According to the 3000 students surveyed from 1700 institutions in the US, 58% feel comfortable connecting with other students about their studies, and a quarter feel that Facebook is valuable to their academic success. Another quarter use other social learning sites, and over 10% want to see these sites incorporated into their formal learning environment. I will come back to these sites in a minute. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- The next two slides are from the ECAR website presentation itself and are a graphical version of the previous slide. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- This pie chart is more positive than I would have thought: one third of students feel it is appropriate to be friended by an instructor. Not quite the “Get off of my Cloud” scenario of maybe 3-4 years ago. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Read quote. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Let’s look briefly at some of the new social learning sites that are popping up on the Web, that 23% of the ECAR students said they are using. Most of these were discussed in an article published a year ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- OpenStudy, perhaps the most successful at the moment, focuses on the peer learning aspect of sharing information. It is open for all students to join and use. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Even before you log in to OpenStudy, you are asked to join a group, so that you can see the real time social activity and sharing on the site. Very strategic. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- GradeGuru, from the educational publisher McGraw-Hill, is another popular peer learning platform, based in the UK. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And Purdue, famous for its OWL website, has created mixable. It is an application that makes use of social networks such as Facebook to allow Purdue students to interact with each other and share information in their Purdue subjects. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Schoology may be my favourite. It is a startup from New York, not institutionally-affiliated, but which has the look and feel of Facebook while maintaining much of the functionality of a learning management system. I will be trialing it with a group of students next year. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And here is SNAPVU, a Victoria University social learning environment that I designed and put together in Drupal. It is now the university’s primary academic skills development website, containing student blogs, a Facebook-like Wall, study group options, personal profiles, and a personal learning environment page called My SNAPVU. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Students can customize this page by deciding which blocks of information they want on this page, and creating a Recommended Resources block that feeds resources to them based on their stated preferences. And the system now has a user tagging, or folksonomy, system, in addition to the controlled vocabulary of tags, so that students can create their own personal and collective ontology. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- SNAPVU blogs are an informal learning component of the site. Here is our First-year Experiences blog, in which first-year students blogged throughout the year about their experiences as new university students. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- We also have over 200 student-created academic skills support videoclips, like this one on how to read journal articles for Psychology. As you can see, we designed the video pages a little like a YouTube page, with the ability for students to tag, rate, and comment on the videos. The videos are, in fact, hosted on a YouTube channel called snapvu, and then pulled into these SNAPVU pages so that we can generate social activity on SNAPVU. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And yet there are some surprising statistics on SNAPVU if we look at the Web analytics of the site. Over the lifespan of the site, so from around June 2010 when we soft-launched the site, there have been 8600 viewings of these videos by users. If we look at the YouTube stats, however, there have been 38,000 views in that time – over 4 times as many viewings. Click - Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And YouTube is where students are commenting as well, not on SNAPVU. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- So it’s interesting. In a survey conducted last year as part of a SNAPVU pilot evaluation, we learned that only one third of students wanted to be able to participate on SNAPVU, though two-thirds wanted the option. One third didn’t really care as long as they got the information they needed. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- And yet we still insist on the value of active learning, and on implementing “Pedagogy 2.0”. As McLoughlin & Lee maintain in a 2008 paper: “ There is a need to expand our vision of pedagogy so that learners become active participants and co-producers rather than passive consumers of content, and learning processes are participatory and social, supportive of personal life goals and needs” And we do this through: “ increasing the level of socialization and collaboration with experts, community, and peer groups ” “ fostering connections that are often global in reach” Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- One final way I’d like to mention of supporting learning through social media is through the development of Personal Learning Networks. Alec Couros provides a nice description of a PLN here: “ Personal learning networks are the sum of all social capital and connections that result in the development and facilitation of a personal learning environment.” In other words, all of those websites, blogs, and people who inform the development of my personal learning interests. This is a very inadequate mindmap of my Personal Learning Network, because in fact it is much more detailed and expanded than this. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- But if we can get our students to engage in developing their own personal learning network on any of a variety of platforms, it may be a very beneficial exercise. I would like to play this three-minute video from a young woman who has built her own PLN on a platform called Symbaloo. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Some people use Google Reader to aggregate their journal and blog RSS feeds in one place. And there are other platforms for gathering twitter feeds, or mobile apps like Flipboard for the ipad and Ziibii for the iphone that organise your feeds from a variety of social platforms. Whether they are informal or formal learning networks, they all contribute to the development of our practice. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- Mike Wesch, a recent US Professor of the Year recipient and creator of some popular YouTube videos such as The Web Is Using Us and A Vision of Students Today, uses Netvibes as a kind of learning management system with his students, where he collates their blogs and other student-generated content, as well as the latest academic journal feeds, to give students an active and resource-rich learning environment – and to model for them how to develop a Personal Learning Environment, how to remain current in an academic discipline… Click- Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- … and how to contribute to the disciplinary discourse in a field of study. Here, for example, is a page devoted to hand-picked Anthropology blogs. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- If we don’t start using these tools available to us and to – as I quoted Mike Wesch in an earlier slide – “confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education” – it may well be that education will become increasingly virtualized. There are already a number of online universities, such as Western Governers University in the US, that source their learning material on the Web rather than hire teachers. And this article was published a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal with the intriguing title: “My Teacher Is an App” – citing the increasing popularity of online education for K-12 students. And I found this article from my Personal Learning Network. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- So that brings us back around to the beginning. The social media explosion. None of us really knows where it is going, but we know the revolution is being tweeted about. Anyone want to guess how many items have been shared on Facebook since I started this presentation? I’m sorry I can’t offer the prize of a 3G ipad2 or anything. Go to website. Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood
- I have a bibliography at the end of the presentation, and I’ll be making these slides available on the conference website. Thank you! Technology for Learning and Teaching Summit 2011 Kirkwood