INSTITUTIONAL SOCIAL NETWORKS:

A TOOL FOR

STUDENT COMMUNICATION AND TEACHING?

Bernadette John Stylianos Hatzipanagos

King’s College London

8th Excellence in Teaching conference, King’s College London

Overview of talk

• Social Media in Higher education: opportunities

• KINSHIP: a social network for King’s

• KINSHIP evaluation:

• Implications for formal/informal learning

• Digital professionalism

• Towards the mobile social networking site: lessons from KINSHIP

Social media and user-generated content’

• Collective and collaborative information is gathered,

shared, modified and redistributed in creative acts;

• Personal sites and content increasingly belong to the

so called ‘me media’ category;

• The user controls the choice of tools and services;

• The ‘collective intelligence’ of users is harnessed

through aggregation and large-scale cooperative

activities

(Hatzipanagos & Warburton 2009)

Social Media:

A map

Digital literacies for 21st century

learners

• Generation Y (also known as the Millennial) uses

technology at higher rates than people from other

generations

• Digital divide

• Digital natives vs. digital immigrants: (probably a

myth); digital residents and digital visitors.

• Peer-oriented due to easier facilitation of

communication through technology

• Multitasking

Ubiquity and multi-functionality:

• Blogs (reflective aspect)

• Wikis (collaborative construction of knowledge)

• Social bookmarking (sharing personal references with some form of commentary/tagging)

• Social networking (discussion, communication in formal and informal spaces)

• Immersive environments (virtual worlds, MUVEs)

• e-portfolios to showcase achievement

Social Media in Higher Education:

some examples

Social media : opportunities

Social media can support & sustain communities

much better than previous generations of learning

technologies, where institutional barriers undermined

any initiatives for embedding formal and informal

learning.

Student communities and social media :

opportunities

Social media can help users to:

– Link to professional communities that can provide feedback, support and

professional identity scaffolding.

– Develop an appropriate, professional digital voice

– Link to other learner and expert groups, crossing the curriculum horizontally

and vertically, so that members are not confined by disciplinary/progression

barriers in sharing experiences and learning from others.

– Link to co-curricular and interdisciplinary groups.

– Embed informal and formal lines of communication.

– Create self help sub-groups that can move between boundaries, following a

Communities of Practice trajectory.

– Embed Formal/informal assessment places with an emphasis on formative

rather than summative activities.

Hatzipanagos (in press)

KINSHIP: a social networking site for King’s

students

Findings: evaluating KINSHIP

• Majority of students positive about using KINSHIP as a

digital platform to develop their professional voice and

profiles, ….

• But few actually embraced it fully

• advantage of KINSHIP compared to other social

networks, as it is more exclusive targeting people from

King’s and mainly being used for academic purposes.

• Users seem to respond favourably to the separation of

purely social interactions and work/academic informal or

semi formal interactions

Findings: Online learning for nursing

students using KINSHIP

• Online discussions during the elective period

can facilitate critical thinking about global health

across a range of global health competencies

• Online discussion can facilitate critical reflection

and support global health learning

• Students may not actively participate in an

optional online programme unless it’s tied to

assessment.

Molly Fyfe and Paula Baraitser (November, 2013)

YAMMER: learning from the KINSHIP

experience

• Microsoft Office 365 is integrating Yammer

(our Outlook, excel, word etc. is moving towards

cloud hosting and Yammer will be added to this

suite)

• Simple authentication – towards single sign on

• Help students to establish their digital voice on a

mainstream enterprise communications suite

• Improved communications for collaboration and

group working

• Potential for mobile accessibility and

functionality upgrades

Lessons learnt: towards successful

adoption of a social platform

• A clear identity is required to achieve wider adoption.

• Development and evolution of functionality in step with

commercial platforms

• Improved accessibility via link from front page of KCL

website and redeveloping as a mobile application

• Addressing privacy concerns raised by the students

about potential monitoring by staff/institution

• Actively and consistently promote to students and staff

any internal platform in order to ensure traffic

Any questions?

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