Using social media in LDSESSION AIMS

Review online tools for communicating with students and colleagues

Highlight challenges in the use of social media for learning

Explore how ATLAANZ members could make greater use of social media to strengthen our communities of practice

Martin McMorrow, Massey University, Centre for Teaching & Learning

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

Social media is an online environment opened for the purposes of mass collaboration, where all invited participants can create, post, rate, enhance, discover, consume, and share content without a direct intermediary (Bradley and McDonald, 2011). The term Media in this context is a collaboration environment characterised by storage and transmission of messages around and about content, while social describes the distinct way these messages propagate as one to many and many to many conversations (Minocha & Petre, 2013, p. 10)

What is Social Media?

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

Social Media includes Social Networking Sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc): “personal and personalisable spaces for online conversations and sharing of content based typically on the maintenance and sharing of ‘profiles’ where individual users can represent themselves to other users through the display of personal information, interests, photographs, social networks and so on” (Selwyn, 2009, p. 157).

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

Could also incorporate blogs and podcasts:

http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/LearnDevDist/

http://masseyblogs.ac.nz/thelighthouse

http://blogs.city.ac.uk/educationalvignettes/

http://tinyurl.com/6xy9hy

Academic English Podcast

… and media repositories such as YouTube and Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net/martinmcmorrow

http://tinyurl.com/ctlvideos

How can social media be used in LD?

• Student use of FB etc seen as a ‘backstage area’ for students, embedded in the identity politics of their offline social lives (Selwyn, 2009) – shown by Uni-related comments on FB wall mainly limited to:

(1) recounting and reflecting on the university experience; (2) exchange of practical information; (3) exchange of academic information; (4) displays of supplication and/or disengagement;(5) ‘banter’ (i.e. exchanges of humour and nonsense)

It can be difficult for Learning Advisors to engage with students in the Social Networking (Facebook) environment

• ‘Cause I can’t just rely on my own instincts. I don’t know.• Yeah, because I think if I was to do everything all by myself, I

would just …• Fail [laughs]• … be second-guessing myself and I’d be like, ok, cause I’ll write

something and I’ll make a point and I’ll put that in and I’ll be like ‘sweet. But [pause] I don’t know if that’s relevant’

• So I’d say to [other student], ‘I’m thinking of putting this in’• It’s kind of down to how vague the assignment direction is. • Because when we get directed to do an assignment, we’ll say as

a whole group on in our Facebook page, ‘What does this mean? What do you think this means?’ And they’ll say, ‘I thought it meant this.’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ So you’ll do it based on what they thought it meant. But if you both got

the wrong idea, even if you end up writing similar things, then she’d say, “Plagiarism”.

Students I’ve interviewed have spoken about using FB in this way (as a kind of ‘counterculture’ to the official, sparsely-used forums provided by the University)

•It’s also very hard now because everyone’s aware of the extent which they’ll take what you’re doing as collusion, or whatever it is and people are becoming very cautious and are less likely to help people out because people would be like, “Just what are you going to say?”• “Oh, we shouldn’t talk about this”• Or if people ask me that, I’ll just say something very vague, because I don’t want to give them my points, because if they start writing about that• It looks like we’ve been working together.

•[interviewer] OK, so it might have the unintended effect of putting you off working together and sharing your ideas?• Yeah.• Which is a shame.• It’s like, ‘cause we don’t want to share ideas, but we want them to understand what they have to do.

•It’s not like any of us kind of like leeches of each other; we all do our own work; we all are hard workers. But we do need to come together as a group to discuss things. • And check that what we are doing is OK• But now it’s like, ‘Should we be doing this?’• And I also feel that the point of assignments is to learn something, and you’re going to learn more if you build your knowledge from other people; all of their references coming in; all of your references coming in. And kind of bring in as much information as possible. To get a good outcome and the most learning from it.• But we’re being discouraged from that• And learning less because we’re being encouraged to work together but almost not work together.

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

“Social media is not just for socializing. When handled correctly, you can use it to enhance your personal brand, establish your expertise, or demonstrate your digital fluency. Commit to using social media for professional reasons and be proactive about managing your activity and image. Consider what potential employers or colleagues will see - you don't want them to discover only pictures of you and your dog, or worse. Make sure at a minimum you have a LinkedIn account with a completed profile. Try tweeting or blogging about your area of expertise, thereby creating content that others can forward, retweet, or repost. This can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field.” Harvard Business Review Management Tip, 9 March 2012 (as cited in The Handbook of Social Media, p. 6)

There is a potential for Tertiary Institutions to help students develop social media skills for professional purposes (‘digital professionalism’)

See also BBC resources on appropriate social networking: http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/0/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16859744

Use of Social Media to develop our CoP

The range of uses of social media by researchers, summarised in Minocha and Petre (2013, p. 27), would probably apply equally to Learning advisors:

• Formal dialogues (e.g. with supervisors)• Informal dialogues (e.g. with peers)• Document authoring, storage, exchange• Space for reflection, working on ideas etc• Engaging with the community at large• Keeping informed

It was interesting that despite the wide range of online tools used for these purposes, email was by far the most used and highly rated 

To develop our Social Networking tools, I have set up ATLAANZ accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare and Flickr

To learn about Twitter, I joined up the 10 Days of Twitter course for Learning Developers, run by Helen Webster from Cambridge University – details in the blog: http://ld5d.wordpress.com

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

The key to Twitter is the use of hashtags to link postings on the same topic

• A hashtag is any word preceded by # in a tweet

Useful hashtags to include in your tweets might be:

• #studychat (when giving advice to students) • #loveLD and #ATLAANZ (when sharing with other

learning advisers

• # + name of your institution’s twitter account – for example #MasseyUni

For instance, these are some tweets that included the tag #studychat

This means that your tweet will come up in any search for that hashtag

• Developing our own social media skills

• Contributing to the development of students’ digital professionalism / literacies

• Using social media – whether based on emails, Facebook, Twitter or whatever – to enhance the cohesiveness and ‘organisational learning’ of our members

Social Networking Issues for ATLAANZ

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

USEFUL ONLINE RESOURCES

http://www.paulselearning.com/education/resources

• two lists of online tools for educators from Paul Andrews and Andy Mitchell from the UK

http://socialmedia4us.wordpress.com

• a blog and presentation from Sue Beckingham, an educational developer at Sheffield Hallam Uni

http://tinyurl.com/gettingstartedwithtwittertips

http://imaturestudent.wordpress.com/a-z-of-web-2-0-tools/

http://tinyurl.com/socialmedia4researchers

http://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-for-higher-education

• A guide to using Social Media in research by Shailey Minocha and Marian Petre from the Open University

• A ‘curated’ collection of resources on social media in higher education

See slides online at: http://tinyurl.com/ATLAANZsocialmedia

REFERENCES

Minocha, S., & Petre, M. (2013). Handbook of social media for researchers: Digital technologies for research dialogues. Retrieved from http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae_Innovate_Open_University_Social_Media_Handbook_2012.pdf

Selwyn, N. (2009). Faceworking: Exploring students’ education-related use of Facebook. Learning, Media and Technology, 34(2),157–174

Thanks to Ximena Riquelme for passing on some really useful articles on this topic, including the Selwyn paper – and to Helen Webster, Sue Beckingham, Sandra Sinfield and other Learning Developers from ALDinHE in the UK – Social Networking in action!