Discussion
This
study indicates that educators utilize social media as an instructional medium
to blend informal learning into formal learning environments within the public
administration discipline. Social media provides them with the ability to break
the limitation of course management systems, enables innovative and
collaborative interactions, connects textbook knowledge to real-world problems,
and facilitates personalized constructive learning. However, respondents also
observed pitfalls or challenges, such as privacy concerns for faculty and
students and helping students use the tools for learning, rather than
entertainment or personal interactions. This discussion section uses the
observations from study participants and expands further to suggest areas for
future development and research.
Social
media and networking technologies have significant potential to recreate the
learning environment between student and teacher. Learning can be experienced
as a uniquely social enterprise; course content can be co-created by a
community of learners, where the instructor is a learner along with students.
The role of instructor might then transform to become as much facilitator as
subject matter expert. As one respondent noted, such role transformation can
allow greater interaction across the teacher-student divide: “Students are more
engaged with the professor...thus, appear to be more engaged with the
materials.”
These
technologies, however, may not be implemented in their most pure form to take
advantage of their full potential. The concerns expressed by faculty—namely
concerns of privacy and student-teacher relationships—may alter the social
landscape to prevent possible desired learning outcomes from being achieved. This
dynamic can be understood through Fountain’s (2001) technology enactment
framework. Writing about how government agencies adopt and adapt
e-technologies, Fountain observed that there is an important distinction
between objective and enacted technologies. Objective technologies are the
tools available that might directly be applied in the practice of teaching and
learning (e.g., Facebook, Wikispace, YouTube, Ning). Enacted technologies are
the same tools altered, based on institutional rules and organizational
culture. What is enacted, thus, may be less than what is possible given the
optimum or full use of the technologies. Learning outcomes that are possible in
social environments may not be realized if the social dimensions of the
objective technologies are not fully enacted.
Continuing
development of social networking and other collaborative tools and increased
opportunities for interaction will require new ways to measure academic
progress in real time. Using traditional formal learning assessments to evaluate
the social learning process is difficult, especially if the learning happens
outside the classroom in an informal learning environment. If educators make
use of the informal learning that occurs on social media and networking
services, it is possible that the achievement gap between marginalized students
and mainstream students can be reduced. Conversely, as study respondents
observed, using these social tools in the learning process may lead to more
distractions, and, thus, reduce student achievement. Further testing is needed
on this important question of impacts of social media on academic performance.
Future research can also explore the effects of using rubrics for social media
use on learning outcomes and can include experiments to determine the best
facilitation and assessment strategies for social learning.
The
cultural norms that create a separation between teacher and student represent
one filter that can drive a wedge between objective and enacted social media
and networking technologies. Teachers, who have reservations about sharing
their full “personal” selves, may disadvantage their students by diminishing
the roots of their passions in the subject matter being taught (Palmer, 2007).
Faculty who address this cultural norm by creating separate social media
identities for their students than those for friends and family fall into this
trap, as do faculty who refuse to “friend” current students at all. Some
respondents in this study participated in both activities. Splitting oneself
into personal, professional, and other categories diminishes the full social
potential of technologies that thrive based on a willingness to be transparent
about one’s whole self. The enacted technology, then, is less than social and,
thus, less likely to generate desired learning outcomes.
To
achieve possible learning outcomes, capacity building and training is necessary
for faculty, so that they can understand the theory behind social learning and
the limitations that are created through the erection of a wall between teacher
and students. Similarly, university rules that permit or do not permit the use
of social media for teaching need to be examined to ensure such rules are not
artificially constraining the pure adoption of objective social technologies.
This call for institutional support is consistent with findings from this
study. Interviewees expressed a strong need for faculty support in terms of
adopting new technologies. They would like to have access to technologies and
learn more about new ways of using them, such as best practices and pitfalls.
They looked forward to their institutions embracing innovations. There is,
ultimately, a need for crafting and implementing clearly stated institutional
policies on the use of social media in the educational environment.
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