Social Media in Learning

Abstract

Opinion among educators differs as to whether the use of social media is a useful and effective learning tool or a medium of distraction for learners. Regardless, experts agree that social media is here to stay and that debate properly centers on the best ways of integrating social media in the classroom. Topics include the roles of educators and learners in the process. There are advantages and disadvantages to social media in learning, and much empirical research on how specific learning styles and online tools can bridge the gap between educators and students and foster self-reliance and participatory learning among students.

Overview

Social media began to appear in the late 1990s and soon became immensely popular, especially with college aged and younger people. The adoption of social media in universities worldwide, according to recent studies, has facilitated communication among students, enhanced collaborative yet autonomous learning, and proved instrumental in developing new forms of work among all participants in teaching and learning. The proliferation of social media, however, has been an issue of contention in academic circles, due to what some view as its negative impact for the general population. While social media has become the most successful application in societies of knowledge, studies also show that a significant percentage of students connect to social media so frequently that they have created a culture of being “constantly connected.” Critics view with concern the constant distraction and relative isolation from “real” or face-to-face interactions, and the potential in social media for deliberatively hostile and offensive interactions, such as trolling and online bullying. Moreover, the information available online is seldom curated, so that inexperienced students may have difficulty distinguishing legitimate from erroneous information.

The relationship between education and communication media has long been a topic of debate for education professionals. Contemporary knowledge societies, that is, those that deal with the creation, transformation, and dissemination of information, use many communication channels and, faced with vast amounts of fast-moving information, education professionals must create computer-based classroom materials to keep up with the times and strive to find theories that will help them teach—and students learn—effectively.

In the twentieth century, mass media became a very important machinery of socialization, with immense power to spread information and influence ideas, habits, and customs in whole societies. The education industry has long considered whether mass media can be viewed as educational, analyzing the ways in which media may be used for teaching and learning processes and how mass media forms and shapes values, perceptions, and other cognitive processes. As computer-based media have grown exponentially, the amount of information disseminated digitally greatly exceeds the volume of information available in traditional educational settings, including classroom content, textbooks, libraries, videos, and so on. Nevertheless, as critics posit, the end goal of mass media is not to educate. Even though mass media includes formats and contents adequate for school-age children, most of its voluminous information is not created for students, even if it is assimilated by them.

Most contemporary societies are deeply mediatized: People are exposed to mass media messages at all times and are increasingly dependent electronic gadgets to communicate with others and to mediate their information. “The media” is commonly used as a catchall to refer to a vast conglomerate of communication channels and technologies, which offer a wide variety of possibilities: print, radio, television, and a variety of online variations on older media—e-publishing, podcasts, and video streaming. Social media draws on other online media, combining the ability to create a network of contacts with a powerful means of self-expression through information and opinion sharing. Most students use social media and virtual communities as their main sources of information about news, available goods and services, to receive information and establishing contacts, leisure and games, project collaborations, as well as chatting and sharing all sorts of hobbies and interests.

Online media have become essential to the teaching and learning process and are commonly used in the classroom. The Internet is probably the medium that incorporated fastest in education, from Internet searches to wikis and digital blackboards, but all media appears ever more frequently in school curricula. Moreover, to forestall the indiscriminate consumption and use of available information, many educational initiatives aim at increasing among students, computer literacy and critical analysis skills. That is, they seek to familiarize students with the overt and implicit codes and messages disseminated by media as well as their implicit and explicit goals. In short, many educational experts stress the importance of learning to be critical with the media, to select what is useful and of interest for knowledge, and to make proper use of all the information available. The goals are extremely complex, however, because the responsibility of raising students who know how to use and consume media properly, is a responsibility that educators must share with parents. There are education media, the finality of which is to explicitly contribute to its users’ education, but experts warn that trying to limit students use to solely educational media in the classroom, is self-defeating in the long run.

Teaching strategies and learning styles now include a diversity of tools that are available online have become an integral part of educational practices. Social media has become an important tool, with great potential for collaborative learning, information sharing, and cooperative learning. One of the challenges of contemporary education has been to re-create educational spaces and adapt them to individuals used to a digital media environment undergoing constant change. Social media offers enormous possibilities for learning, given the high rates of student dependence on social media platforms. Innovative and forward-thinking educational institutions around the world have adopted social media into teaching learning strategies, which students may incorporate into their learning practices.

Applications

Web 2.0 brought interactivity to the Internet, and its implications for educational were many: innovative processes, new styles of communication, a re-creation of teaching-student roles, sharing and intervention scenarios, and, in general, a widening of the sphere for learning activities while ensuring all these complied with educational requirements. Take, for instance, the novel idea that the classroom could have a virtual component or take place fully online. It impacted all levels of education, from primary and secondary to higher education, as all moved to take advantage of the Internet’s potential. Educational institutions soon realized the great advantages for sharing and collaborating online, including the fact that free and accessible programs were cost-effective as well as powerful. Moreover, adding a digital component to classroom learning appeared to increase student motivation and interest.

One of the most visible advantages of the Internet is its ease of use: free platforms, access from almost any desktop or mobile device, sharing of information that used to be privileged or costly. The appearance of social media increased the advantages—and accelerated the development—of collective or group intelligence, that is, the intelligence and information that emerges from collective work, collaboration, and multiple authors. Collective intelligence creates virtual communities of people who share similar interests. These online spaces and networks are intensely social, fostering peer interconnections, and valuing what every individual contributes to the group.

Some educators criticize, however, the distraction that social media represents for students, whose attention is diverted by the wide variety of information. Moreover, it causes a significant decrease in the ability to focus on tasks. Even when engaged in school-related tasks, critics argue, students are overwhelmed by the number of links to complementary texts, data, and videos. Another disadvantage are the myriad sites of relevant information but low academic standards, which inexperienced students cannot categorize as to topic pertinence and relevance.

Advocates of social media in learning, however, point out that the proliferation of social media—which includes networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and others—leads users to develop complex new digital skills; because they are so user-friendly, people quickly become literate in their use.

Moreover, social media modifies the educator’s role. For social media to be the transformative space of education it can be, it is important to highlight the educator’s job. In online media processes, an educator participates by generating knowledge jointly with the student. This occurs in a constructive and less hierarchical manner than in traditional classroom settings. Rather than the teacher imparting knowledge, it highlights the processes of collaborative organization, comprehension, and interpretation of the information accessed.

The educator’s efforts focus on supporting the student as he or she develops talents and new skills, using new learning schemas. In other words, the teacher becomes a guide or facilitator. Working side-by-side with the teacher, a student becomes a more self-sufficient learner, actively participating in his or her construction of knowledge. Social media has, then, democratized the learning process. A teacher ceases to be a unique source of knowledge and is rather a legitimate tutor, mediator, or guide of the learning process.

Issues

Social media centers the learning process on the student, placing the student at its core. It becomes necessary, then, that he or she be an active participant in the gathering and creation of knowledge. In the context of social media, students develop useful skills such as finding, categorizing, interpreting, internalizing, and reproducing information. To be successful at these, it is important that they recognize their own learning styles, that is, their individual way of processing information and knowledge. Students have different ways of learning, which experts have categorized according to different schemas: visual, auditive, kinesthetic, reflexive, and others.

Recent trends in social media in learning foster the development of an understanding of learning styles and how they work when interacting with social media for learning. Scholars define learning styles as sets of talents, preferences, trends, temperaments, and attitudes that an individual, as well as the different skills that make him or her different from others. Learning styles influence not only how individuals learn, but also how they communicate, think, and even how they teach. Depending upon learning style, self-aware students may develop strategies that help improve academic performance. In a largely self-directed online learning environment, it behooves students—as well as educators—to be knowledgeable about different strategies that work with specific learning styles.

Learning strategies are methods and steps that learners take, purposefully and intentionally, to enhance their learning process; they include the acquisition of tools aimed at effective gathering of information, meaningful interpretation and problem-solving. One of the most common ways in which social media collaborates with learning is by promoting the creation of virtual learning communities in which students use social networks and media to research content, engage in online study groups, conduct surveys, as well as seek information of personal interest. In all of these, students act autonomously as individuals responsible for their own learning process. In this sense, then, use of social media platforms can be considered a learning strategy, because these venues play the role of information and media facilitators. They may also be considered as a value-added element to the learning process and a central or peripheral tool for research projects and other school-related tasks.

The use of social media as a learning strategy is expanding greatly. It is already a mainstay in the lives of students as well as educators. Studies find that students report using social media at percentages between 71 and 90 percent to communicate with others, including for school assignments and other school-related tasks. As pertains to learning styles, other studies on learning and social media have shown that the majority of the students who use social media for school related are mostly reflexive, kinesthetic, and visual, with the lower percentages of students whose learning style is auditive.

Social media is fast becoming a ubiquitous learning tool that allows the development of communicative and learning skills and may be used as a learning strategy by students. As it is, most students use social media constantly, and already include them as part of their academic activities. Incorporating social media into the classroom teaching-learning process can help bridge the gap between teacher and student, because social media platforms are already structured for social interaction, collaborative sharing, and as a space for dialog. Social media can be used for mutual learning and enrichment, for students and educators. For instance, a teacher who modulates and collaborates with the learning of his or her students can help them adapt to the various learning styles shared in the classroom and also evaluate the individual and collective learning process of the students. After all, social media is a public space that allows for different degrees of interaction, which enables an educator to observe and evaluate without engaging in any serious degree of interference.

Social media can be structured as tasks (a set of steps), plans, and routines that students engage in to facilitate the acquisition, storage, recovery, and use of information with the purpose of learning. It can promote educational transformation by involving teachers and students in the collaborative process and even facilitate situations in which these roles may be exchanged. Despite its potential for negative outcomes, social media can also be a site where the interaction, individuality, and multiculturality is respected and enriched by the collaborative learning process. Furthermore, it can lead to self-awareness and reflection about learning and human relations, for students as well as for teachers.

Terms & Concepts

Kinesthetic Learning Style: Learning style in which learners use touch and engage in physical activities to master subject matter.

Reflexive Learning: Reflective learners constantly engage with and react to what is happening in the environment around them.

Self-awareness: Being conscious of one’s own motives, perceptions, emotions, and expectations. Acts of self-reflection—giving serious thought and consideration to one’s motives, principles, actions, and inclinations—lead a person to self-awareness.

Social Media: Computer-based applications and websites in which people can share and build content—such as videos, memes, and texts—to share either privately with privileged connections or publicly with the purpose of disseminating posts through connected networks.

Social Networks: Online networks facilitated by platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, where people can make social relations and interactions.

Visual Learning Style: A learning style in which learners fare better if they have visual cues and props, such as charts and maps, to illustrate the information he or she is absorbing.

Web 2.0: The second generation of web development, enabled the creation of extremely user-friendly, interactive sites on the Internet that emphasize sharing of content generated by users. From this sprang an interconnected, participatory culture in which information is shared via social media.

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Suggested Reading

Akman, I., & Turhan, C. (2018). Male and female differences in the use of social media for learning purposes. Innovations in Education & Teaching International, 55(5), 543–553.

Andersson, E. (2016). Producing and consuming the controversial—a social media perspective on political conversations in the social science classroom. Journal of Social Science Education, 15(1), 6–16. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=113857251&site=ehost-live

Baker, L. R., & Hitchcock, L. I. (2017). Using Pinterest in undergraduate social work education: Assignment development and pilot survey results. Journal of Social Work Education, 53(3), 535–545. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=123985705&site=ehost-live

De Silva, D., Ranasinghe, W., Bandaragoda, T., Adikari, A., Mills, N., Iddamalgoda, L., … Bolton, D. (2018). Machine learning to support social media empowered patients in cancer care and cancer treatment decisions. PLoS ONE, 13(10), 1–19.

Greenhow, C., & Sonnevend, J. (Eds.). (2016). Education and social media: Toward a digital future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ramoroka, T., Tsheola, J., & Sebola, M. (2017). E-culture as a panacea for successful implementation of blended pedagogies in South Africa. Bangladesh E-Journal of Sociology, 14(2), 31–40. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=125268475&site=ehost-live