This was a presentation that I gave to lead a discussion on the use of social media in higher education teaching and learning. Some of the points on the slides came from the discussion which took place in the group regarding social media and its use in teaching and learning in higher education

1. Social media in higher education
teaching and learning
Vivienne Bozalek
University of the Western Cape
vbozalek@uwc.ac.za

2. Blogging
Facebook
Linkedin
Twitter
The social
network
My Space
Google
Plus
Digital Media
Flickr
Vimeo
RSS
Feeds
Mobile
Technology
The Student
Filtering, analyzing, accepting ,
rejecting information from the network
knowledge nodes, but also seeding
back into the nodes and creating
Regulated environment (Teacher involvement)
Traditional Information
Static
Websites
Creating connections
(patterns) between
ideas and concepts
Learning
(Personal Learning)

3. Growing
ubiquity of
social
media
(Johnson et
al., 2014)

4. Issues to consider
• Higher educators use social media (70% social & 50%
professional according to Pearson) but have little
knowledge of applying this to teaching and learning
• Ditto for students social media literacies in formal
learning situations (tend to use it informally)
• Important for students and higher educators to
understand affordances and challenges of different
social media for teaching and learning (Bower, 2008)

6. Emerging Technologies course
disrupting existing
institutional practices
Mission: Four institutions convening a single module for educators
drawn from these institutions with a shared goal of modeling teaching
with emerging technologies to improve teaching & learning practices.

7. The South African higher education landscape is still affected by the historical inequities
of past policies, and many students and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), particularly
the Historically Disadvantaged Institutions (HDIs) are affected by scarce resources and
poverty. Higher education institutions themselves are also unequally placed with regard
to resources and the students that they enroll (Bozalek & Boughey, 2012)
☜
Challenges facing SA HEIs

8. Why we did it
• Too much time wasted in reinventing the wheel - in Silos
• Best practices are 'locked up' in walls and not shared
Objective: to create a conducive learning space where
participants could be free to share ideas and
experiences with peers and facilitators from other HEIs.

9. What we did
Source:
http://checet.blogspot.com/

10. Methodology
We did not want to teach colleagues but
wanted them to learn, not to learn
about tools but how to teach with tools
So…We de-emphasised teaching to foreground
learning and de-emphasised tools and emphasised
practice

11. Theory-based design framework
Meaningful learning and interaction
Pedagogical
Model
2
Learning
Strategies
Pedagogical
tools
1
3
Theory: a tightly coupled relationship between pedagogical model (learning objective),
learning strategies (activities) and pedagogical tools (appropriate technologies) is required for
meaningful learning (Adapted from: Dabbagh, 2005)

12. What we learnt quickly
All four participating institutions each had a different LMS
which meant that for some participants:
i) the LMS was new to them,
ii) experiences might not be meaningful in their respective
contexts
We decided to focus on cloud-based tools. So re-designed
to model best practices for empowering
educators on teaching with emerging technologies.

13. Cloud-based tools
Generic tools become pedagogical tools when wrapped around pedagogy and learning strategies

14. Key Findings of study of higher
educators at PGDip course
Disadvantages of using connectivist tools?
● ‘Infrastructure constraints’ hinders the real time
communication (digital divide),
● not all social media is suitable for teaching and
learning, and
● facilitation and monitoring can be challenging

15. Key Findings (cont.)
‘Personal’ vs. ‘Learning’?
● It is difficult to separate the ‘personal’ from
‘learning’,
● some social media tools offer a better platform for
‘the personal’ than for ‘the learning’, and

16. Framework and
cognitive
engagement in
connectivist learning
Wang, Z, Chen, L. & Anderson, T.
(2014).

17. ALT survey on use of tech
• Lack of staff time and support
• Lack of support at senior level
• Lack of leadership in effective use of technology
• Lack of incentives
• Lack of funding for technologies
• Reliance on certain individuals
• (Laurillard & Deepwell, 2014)

18. ALT survey encouraging use
• Support teachers as active, collaborative action
researchers
• Encourage and support use in teaching
• Build in time for teacher development
• Leaders at all levels to take part in strategic approach
• Develop sustainable, education-oriented IT infrastructure
• Recognise and reward innovation
• Engage students in active learning (Laurillard &
Deepwell, 2014)

19. Social media in teaching
• How much control does the teacher have using
social media?
• ‘Fit for purpose’
• E.g. use of Twitter in teaching and learning - use
hashtags for conversations
• Finding time to stay in touch is difficult
• Resistance to mixing social life with academic life
– perhaps have different accounts – lack of trust

20. Social media
• Concern of surveillance of students
• Too many tools too many sites for students to put
things in
• SMS good way of notifying students who should
take responsibility for change of numbers
• Relationships between lecturers and students – prof
boundaries and time issues – ethical issues
• How to shape the content of what is distributed –
authenticity with social media

21. Social media
• Lecturer as facilitator or knowledge producer –
• Quality assurance of content – what responses are being
put out there
• Can have a suite of things for different purposes
• Cost of developing Apps is coming down
• Use what the learners know and match that with
educational intentions
• Concerns about who controls social media – the issue of
security – money making. People give up privacy

22. Social media
• Building own social media platforms for
institutions or across institutions
• Can’t control everything – students are using
technology to share informally anyway –
challenge to manage it
• Policies should be to guide students and
academics on how to use it for educational
purposes – need to look also at legal aspects

24. Policy Implications for us
• Policies to strongly support innovative pedagogies using
social media – time off, professional development (Johnson
et al., 2014, Stevenson & Hedberg, 2011)
• Revise the research/teaching dualism/binary (Johnson et
al., 2014) expanded social SoTL (Greenhow & Gleason,
2014)
• Guidelines on how to use social media for students and
academics
• Participatory, collaborative method with top-down policy
development (Johnson et al., 2014)

25. References Greenhow, C. & Gleason, B. (2014). Social scholarship: Reconsidering scholarly practices in the age of social media, British Journal of
Educational Technology, 45 (3): 392-402.
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas:
The New Media Consortium.
Laurillard, D. & Deepwell, M. (2014) ALT survey on the effective use of learning technology in educataion. Education Technology Action
Group.
Seaman,J&Tinti-Kane,H. (2013). Social Media for Teaching and Learning. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions.
Social media in education: ethical concerns
Posted on 01 July 2014. Tags: Changing the learning landscape, ethics, HEA, Mark Childs, social media, Steve
Wheeler,Teresa MacKinnon
Stevenson, M. & Hedberg, J.G. (2011) Head in the clouds: a review of
current and future potential for cloud-enabled pedagogies, Educational Media International, 48:4,
321-333, DOI: 10.1080/09523987.2011.632279
Wang, Z, Chen, L. & Anderson, T. (2014). A Framework for Interaction and Cognitive Engagement in Connectivist Learning
Contexts. The International Review of Open and Distance Learning, 15, 2, 121-141
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