I was always wondering how I could use social media in education. Though I undefinedly thought it would be great to utilize the collaborative features of social media in formal learning, I was not quite sure how I could use social media in education without any resistance or distraction.
I had several interviews with undergraduate students this Spring and most of them said that they had very limited experiences of using social media in their classes. Many said they just watched YouTube videos, used Google office for a group project, or searched for some additional resources related to their course topics. I also confirmed this unpopularity of social media in formal learning from some journal articles. However, it seemed like students used social media a lot for the informal learning. In fact, social media activities in a formal learning have also been somewhat informal in the way it was operated and assessed. Instructors usually used social media for an extra communication tool and did not count those activities in the course grading.
During this summer, for a short six-week period, I got introduced many new tools from Web 2.0 class and tried them in different ways. We learned about network individuals, produsage, crowdsourcing, social bookmarking, folksonomies, PLN, and privacy issues. While studying these topics and doing my assignments, I could think about the usage of social media in education on a deeper level. Also, our classmates shared so many great ideas and perspectives together. What a collective intelligence!
I know some students feel distracted to use social media in formal learning or just do not like social media for privacy reasons. This negativity is very much related to their intensity of social media use and performed perception of using social media in education. Yes, we still have many issues of employing social media in our classrooms…but there are so many good things as well as bad things. We need to find some good ways to get over the risks and issues rather than just giving up. Anyway, Web 2.0 was really a fun and useful course that I would never forget. I would strongly recommend this course to other ISLT students. I actually think this course should be required. :-)
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