Leading up to this semester I decided to
leave the facebook so that I could focus on schooling and rid myself of a pretty heavy time drain. It was a bittersweet experience. After returning to the facebook this evening, I have a teachable moment for you all to ponder.
The typical paradigm for research on online social media in education is
social constructivism. This perspective suggests that groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.
Much of my research focuses around the benefits of new online social media and its potential value in education. Having just completed my final research paper for my M.Ed./ILP program in social studies education, I decided it would be fun to log back on and see what everyone has been up to.
It was a
Rip Van Winkle story but instead of the bad things dissappearing, the collective
apathy was alive and worse than I ever realized. I was intrigued to read the following status updates from my nameless classmates:
Person X is not even sure what "action research" means, but knows that this paper is not it.
Person Y is throwing words onto a page and calling it an Action Research Project. YUP
Person Z is going to punch APA style citations in the face
Person W is really going to make progress on this stupid paper today
Suppose that your students were posting these kind of comments about one of your assignments on facebook, what would you do? Imagine the possibilities! If the
interwebz and its
2.0 friends like
Facebook,
Twitter,
Delicious,
Diigo and
Youtube are truly a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings, then we need to think about the role that we as educators can play within these groups. Are these the type of posts we want to be
modeling for our future students?
What is the role of the teacher in the online social media environment? Do we even need to intervene in this environment as educators? Do we even need to be there in the first place?
danah boyd has a
great post with some concrete advice that educators can take to prepare themselves for this phenomenon.
An excerpt from that article:
Supporting Youth Engagement
By providing just a taste of how social technologies have altered the architecture of public life, my goal is to whet the reader’s appetite. It is critical for educators to understand how mediated publics are shifting the lives of youth. There are very good reasons why youth use them and encouraging them to return to traditional socialisation structures is simply not feasible (boyd, in press). Rather than diving deeper into these shifts, I want to offer some concrete advice to educators about how to think about new media and how to engage with youth directly.
1. Recognise that youth want to hang out with their friends in youth space.
Although most adults wish that formal education was the number one priority of youth, this is rarely the case. Most youth are far more concerned with connecting with their friends. Their activities are very much driven by their friend group and there is immense informal learning taking place outside of school. Learning social norms, status structures, and how to negotiate relationships of all types is crucial to teens. While most adults take these skills for granted, they are heavily developed during those teen years. In contemporary society, this process primarily takes place amongst peer groups.
Right now, the primary public space that allows teens to gather is online. Not surprisingly, teens are gathering there to hang out with their friends. Much of what they’re doing resembles what you did when you hung out with your friends.
2. The Internet mirrors and magnifies all aspects of social life.
When a teen is engaged in risky behaviour online, that is typically a sign that they’re engaged in risky behaviour offline. Troubled teens reveal their troubles online both explicitly and implicitly. It is not the online world that is making them troubled, but it is a fantastic opportunity for intervention. What would it mean to have digital street outreach where people started reaching out to troubled teens, not to punish them, but to help them? We already do street outreach in cities - why not treat the networked world as one large city? Imagine having college students troll the profiles of teens in their area in order to help troubled kids, just as they wander the physical streets. Too often we blame technology for what it reveals, but destroying or regulating the technology will not solve the underlying problems that are made visible through mediated publics like social network sites.
It’s also important to realise that the technology makes it easier to find those who are seeking attention than those who are not. The vast majority of teens using these sites are engaged in relatively mundane activities, but the ‘at risk’ ones are made visible through mainstream media. In this way, both the technology and the press coverage magnify the most troublesome aspects of everyday life because they are inherently more interesting.
3. Questions abound. There are no truths, only conversations.
Over the last year, dozens of parenting guides have emerged to provide black and white rules about how youth should interact with social network sites. Over and over, I watch as these rules fail to protect youth. Rules motivate submissive youth, but they do little to get youth to think through the major issues. Conversation (not lecturing) is key and it needs to be clear that there are no correct answers; it’s all a matter of choices and pros and cons.
A licensed media specialist wears, at least, three very important hats. First, and most importantly, a media specialist is a teacher. Also known as a teacher-librarian, the media specialist provides information literacy and technology literacy instruction for all students in the school. This instruction includes lesson and unit planning as well as feedback and assessment. 
The loss of a media specialist at your school, is a dramatic blow to the students and staff and the entire learning community. Students’ access to important literacy skills, skill essential to the development and sustainable learning is threatened. Additionally, research suggests that a well staffed and fully funded media program has a positive correlation with student achievement. Teachers will lament the loss of a keystone partner in their curricular goals. The media specialist is the lifeblood of fresh new information for teachers to continue their professional development. Finally, and most tragically, the media specialist is an active agent for change in the learning community. By providing physical and intellectual access to information, the media specialist plants seeds for change in all walks of life curricular and extra-curricular. From providing the community with access to news important to them or even as far as supporting the development of new ideas that will change the world, a media specialist is indispensable.
