I have so many thoughts about Social Networking and their use in education. My feelings about their use and their ability to be successful in education are varied. I am going to use this blog entry to highlight what I find to be the pros and the cons of social networking in regards to their educational value. I'll start with positives.
PROS:
1. community--Social networking sites are SOCIAL! They encourage users to interact with each other and share ideas.
2. the use of text-- Social networking sites have a lot of text. The basis of them is that students send messages back and forth by way of typing them out. This requires students to use words (writing) and to read words that other users send to them (reading).
3. usability/21st century-- Students use these programs in their everyday lives. They are familiar with using computers and are knowledgeable and willing to find out how they work.
4. motivation-- Students will be motivated to use something like this in the classroom, because they are already using similar systems at home. Also, they can interact with each other, rather than only with the teacher. Who wants to answer questions posed by the teacher all the time? Here, students challenge each other, and challenges from peers are very motivating to people of all ages!
CONS:
1. community--Sometimes online communities have "intruders", much like we have in our real-world communities. However, teachers have far more control over their classrooms than they have in many social network sites. Liability is the biggest con to social networking.
2. the use of text-- While students are using text, they are often using text in non-standard ways, using net-lingo (http://www.netlingo.com/). Net-lingo, while still text, is basically unacceptable in the real world. We need to be clear on the differences here, and make sure students use real language--or at least understand the difference and appropriate times to use each.
3. usability/21st century-- Teachers don't always know what they're doing, especially when it comes to technology an social networks. As teachers, we need to be knowledgeable about the tools available to us.
4. motivation-- Social networking is SOCIAL. There is a distinction between using the sites to be social, or using them to be educational. That is a fine line to walk as an educator, and in this day and age where we have to prove that what we're doing is the most effective way to teach, we need to make sure that using a network is productive and is achieving a content goal. Students need to understand the purpose for using the social network.
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Your comment number 2 in the cons is a big concern of mine. We've touched on this in class and it was discussed how it's our job as teachers to make sure student's learn the differences of formality in speech according to the situation (in this case on-line).
ReplyDeleteIn an English class I recently took, I did a group research project on the impact of text messaging on more formal means of communication (email, letters, essays, etc). In our work we found that text message lingo, or similar forms of it, was often used across all means of communication. Not until the college level did students begin to realize the differences between these situations and begin to modify their speech. This was a little scary to me and I feel as educators we must constantly be aware of this so that in the future this can be noticed and fixed BEFORE students reach the college level.
I really like how you have presented the two sides of this issue - and like you discovered! They are really the same, it is what lens that you take to view the issue. You are a very competent user of technology, so it will be interesting to see how you might approach this in your own classroom - or will you? You'll have to keep me posted.
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