My Reflection on this Week’s Reading: Social Media and Instructional Design

I had a great time reading about social media and education during this week. Social media and web 2.0 technologies are an attractive supplement to the higher education experience and are embraced as a way to foster intra- and extracurricular knowledge generation among a class community. The implementation of technology into the classroom presents educators with a myriad of options that were not available as little as a few years ago. At the very heart of social media is the ability to generate connections. The community behavior and values that develop in virtual spaces form a “community of practice,” a communicative forum where an organization can collaborate in order to articulate its common goals and act to achieve them. The learning curve associated with various social media does not seem to present overt barriers for the larger body of traditional students and instructors who use them; however, developing a theory of social media use in the classroom in order to maximize student learning outcomes requires further research. Pedagogically speaking, the theory of social constructivism, with its emphasis on groups in the construction of knowledge to promote learning, is a natural pairing for how to use social media.

Social media is, indeed, a pervasive force in the lives of 21st century learners. Social media offers a user experience that encourages students to create and share new content while enabling communication unlike any other learning technology. In this reflective blog post, I explore how learning with social media could be more effective by leveraging appropriate learning theory and instructional design.

The appeal of social media as a learning technology is in large part due to the participatory nature of the viewing, creating, and sharing of content and the knowledge it offers. Social media is in lock step with the tenets of social learning theory, which is based on the premise that people learn through interactions with others (Thompson et al., 2014). Through social media learning tools, learners are able to also share their attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, which are key elements in learning (Bandura, 1986). From an instructional design perspective, social media applications also facilitate the creation of reusable digital content that can be easily updated and revised. Instructional content can be tagged with descriptors, making it searchable and easy to locate. This latent instructional design principle potentially serves students well for when they attempt to study on their own and need to efficiently locate information. Through various social media tools, the masses contribute to the collective knowledge by editing, tagging and distributing information digitally. As a result, information consumers are now also information producers.

A review of articles written by researchers and educators that focused on Web 2.0 technologies in educational contexts suggest that the potential for social media tools for learning has not yet been well explored (Liu and Maddux, 2008). The review also suggests that educators using these new tools may not realize the positive learning outcomes they expect because they are not cognizant of the need for new strategies of instructional design.

The proliferation of social media for learning, the lack of instructional design to support it, and the critical “missing link” of learning theory present opportunities for inquiry and investigation. The questions I pose and seek answers to from my #eme6414 folks are:

1. How is social media currently being integrated in classrooms?

2. What does current research say about social media use in educational contexts?

3. What are the unique social media affordances that could enhance learning?

4. How should learning theory guide the implementation of social media?

5. How can instructional design leverage the unique affordances of social media?

Please share your thoughts with me in the comments section below.

The Social Media Instructional Design Model is intended to minimize the need to be a learning technologies expert and/or well versed on the numerous instructional design models available. Instead, this dynamic instructional tool is meant to help give instructional designers and educators the confidence and ability to be able to design instruction that effectively leverages the affordances of social media appropriately. Additionally, by providing instructional designers and educators with a much-needed model for how to use social media as learning tools, I believe it could also help establish social media as a reliable and effective resource in the classroom.

References:

Bandura, A. (1986). A Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Liu, L., & Maddux, C. D. (2008). Computers in the schools Web 2.0 articles: Content analysis and a statistical model to predict recognition of the need for new instructional design strategies. Computers in the Schools, 25(3-4), 314–328.

Thompson, C., Gray, K., & Kim, H. (2014). How social are social media technologies (SMTs)? A linguistic analysis of university students’ experiences of using SMTs for learning. Internet and Higher Education, 21, 31–40.