Social Media Uses in the Local (American) Context

Having explored a variety of international perspectives on how other educators in the world are using social media in their classrooms, as well as the effects of social media on education in their respective contexts, it is now timely to come back and look at the American context to understand the state of affairs here and how we are employing social media to support learning. Being widely recognised as the no.1 country in technology innovation and entrepreneuring spirit, I would suppose there will far more interesting ideas on social media integration here in the American education system. Apart from what we are doing in this course (which is a GREAT example) and the many personal and professional example which the folks in this class had shared, some other approaches of using Web 2.0 and social media are:

Students in a particular high school are using online chats to discuss about books they had read in class, using the tool to listen and respond to one another’s opinions with textual evidence.

An AP biology teacher in New Milford High school challenges his students to discuss the stages of meiosis on Twitter using a shared hashtag, of which they would need to exercise creativity and succinctness in their answers as limited by the 140 characters.

Rock Prairie Elementary School in College Station, Texas is using social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to build an online community so that they can share school news, communicate and engage with parent groups.

One particular college is also using social media to facilitate research projects by allowing students to search, discover, post findings, and cross-check statements on the platforms. Through the process, students get to engage with the latest real-time events, engage current problems or issues, discuss findings and provide solutions.

In University of Hawaii, students create and share videos on Instagram to introduce themselves, “meet” on Google Hangouts to discuss issues, and “tweet” to share online resources.

Another college professor is streaming and recording his lectures on Periscope, so that student can ask questions in real-time without interrupting the presentation, and those who missed it could also stream and replay the broadcast later on.

From an educational perspective, and with the way social media had permeated our societies like never before, it seems like a foregone conclusion that utilizing social media to support and facilitate learning in the classroom is the way of the future. However, many considerations still have to be taken in order to adopt the right tools and the right strategies to make social media work for us.

With these examples in mind, I am really looking forward to seeing the creations and products of the Produsage Projects in this class, and hopefully that would provide more ideas and inspiration for us to adopt and adapt social media to support learning.   

Sources:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/273044

http://www.teachercast.net/2016/06/02/social-medias-influence-education-system/

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2014/11/05/social-media-gains-momentum-in-online-education

https://www.mheducation.com/blog/thought-leadership/how-social-media-can-help-students-study.html

Designing for Community – Additional Things to Think About!

In this week’s voicethread, Vanessa has talked about some important aspects to think about when designing for an online community; such as shared interest, knowledge and communication needs, goals, anxieties and fears. I also commented and shared on certain issues of technology that educators ought to consider, such as learners access to the tools to be used. Planning for the use of Web 2.0 technology and social media tools can often be a daunting and challenging process, and I would like to suggest a few more aspects to consider:

1. For any learning to take place and flourish, student safety and security is paramount and must be ensured. Instructional designers must therefore design and provide an online environment that is safe for student interactions and closed for the sole purpose of participation by only the learners within the community.

2. There should also be clarity in the instructions to the learners. They must be clear on what to do on the platforms, and what needs to be done to achieve the requirements. If there are assessments within the course, students should also be informed on how and when they would be evaluated for their participation or performance.

3. To enhance the learning experience, no Web 2.0 technology or social media tool should be used in isolation. Instead, plan for a variety of tools and platforms for an enhanced student engagement. On the other hand, using too many tools might also be problematic for learners! Careful thought must be accorded to select the right combination of tools that learners would be comfortable with.

4. Finally, similar to a F2F class, teacher presence in an online environment is very critical as well! As learning in an online community is largely asynchronous in nature, the instructor is even more so important to show his/her presence online to facilitate the activities and provide feedback when necessary.

Source: http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/issue51-classroom01/

Social Media in Singapore’s education landscape

In this post, we will continue to explore how Singaporeans are using social media in their lives, but this time more specifically in the educational context. Singapore has always been considered as having a high-performing education system, but exactly how have we adopted and used social media to support learning in our system? So I went to google in the hope of exploring cases where educators had employed Web 2.0 technologies and social media in the classrooms. The results were interesting and encouraging, and this was what I found:

A secondary school history teacher is using Edmodo (social learning network) for his students to upload photo montages about the Cold War, so that they can showcase their products, share viewpoints and comment on each other’s work at their own convenience. On the same platform, the teacher also upload resources and notes, facilitate discussion boards and create quizzes to assess his student’s understanding.

Another group of 4 secondary school teachers are bringing social media into the classroom to help engage their students in literature study. Again, Edmodo is again the preferred tool for students to live out their lives of the main characters in their literature textbook "Red Sky in the Morning". They learn by posting status updates on Edmodo as those characters, and as the story progressed, their status updates had to reflect the change and growth of the characters. In addition, students also interact within a closed Facebook group that was specially set up for the class, using the platform to discuss their literary opinions and share materials.

In a local university, a professor is using Facebook to teach a Business Communication Course. A closed group was set up to facilitate the learning process; the professor had used the platform to connect with his students, share resources, communicate information and facilitate group discussions.

A polytechnic math lecturer is using Twitter to send out math problems and asking the students to “tweet” out the answers, while projecting the responses on a screen in front of the class in real time.  

     

These are just some examples of how Singapore educators are employing social media to support learning in the classrooms.

Do you identity with any of the strategies above?

In the context that you are familiar with, are there other interesting social media strategies that you had come across to support learning in the classroom?

Social Media - The Singapore Context

So in this week's readings, we get to explore a few different international perspectives on how Web 2.0 and Social Media tools had helped to shape learning in the respective societies, teaching and educational environments. To kick off this week's series of blogposts, I will first look at some of the social media statistics in the context of Singapore to provide the background for further discussion of how Singaporeans might have leveraged and utilized social media in the education settings. The following sets of infographics provides a quick snapshot of social media in the country.

As you can see, Singapore has a small population, but the number of internet users is relatively huge at about 79% of the whole country's people. Social media penetration currently stands at 3.8 Million users (69%), compared to other Asian countries at 51%. This could be strongly attributed to the high connectivity and tech-savvy population in the country.

It is pretty clear that Facebook garners the most users in the realm of social media in Singapore, and I think this is quite consistent with most countries. This is followed by Youtube (video streaming), Whatsapp (instant messaging App) and Google+ (Web 2.0 collaborative tool). Surprising, there are less people using Twitter and Pinterest, tools that could be considered extremely popular in other parts of the world.

It is also starkly clear that corporations and businesses have started to explore and leverage on social media to engage their audience/customers and sell their products. Looking at the most popular answers that they are seeking, they want to know more about tactics and tools to connect and engage their audience, as well as analytics to measure the success.

Looking at the gender demographics, there is not a lot of difference between male and female users in the three social networks; Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

So the biggest takeaway from these statistics is that Social Media platforms are certainly flourishing and its penetration amongst the population is only going to get higher with increased connectivity and proliferation of smartphones in the country. There is also a good spread of Web 2.0 tools and social networks that the population is using. This data also shows which tools are most popular with internet users, and therefore provides business owners and educators with a clear idea of which media to utilize to engage their audiences and achieve their respective outcomes.






Source: http://www.hashmeta.com/social-media-singapore-infographic/

A Quick Recap & Reflection On This Course So Far

I think most of you can agree with me that we have definitely achieved much in the last four weeks of this course. So much so that as I recap on tools that we had been introduced to, the class activities that we had dabbled in, the interactions that we had on social media, I must say the list is pretty long! So as I rolled back the time and try to recollect how and why we had been using each of the tools for, everything seems much clearly to me now.

In week 1, we started our individual blogs and began our blogging journey. We jumped onto Twitter and tweeted our lives away. We explored networks and communities, and how they can work for us. Essentially, we learned how to share resources via such blogging and online/social bookmarking platforms, and important piece of how we engage with one another in the online environment.

In week 2, we explored tools such as LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat in relation to PLNs. We dived into communities to observe how they function and understand norms associated with each of them. Essentially, we learned how social networking can expand one’s resources to attain specific knowledge or information.

In week 3, we tried Pinterest, Flickr, Reddit, Diigo and other tools to discover more resources, and in the process understood how their utilities can support us to promote or search for expertise knowledge. Essentially, we learned how social bookmarking/tagging is fundamental to how these tools function and operate. We also engaged one another on IP issues on the social media, and how to tackle them.

And this week, we started with Wikis and Google Maps, and in the process learned how the creation of online workspaces could promote and facilitate collaborative activities within the class. This has also nicely provided the backdrop for us to think deeper about instructional design for social media.

So how do we approach instructional design for social media?

From our collective experiences, I can say that it is indeed undeniable that social media has kept us highly engaged and intellectually challenged. It is a unique process where we explored and discovered new territories. It is experiential learning in practice. While we enjoy the activities and the process of learning, we also have to reflect upon our learning experiences and evaluate our growth. Using this course as an example, the graded assignments and projects provided a good avenue for that formal assessment piece. In other words, when designing instruction for social media, one must not be distracted by merely focusing on the learning activities, but the emphasis must also be placed on the learning outcomes.   

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The Rise of Temporary & Anonymous Apps - A Worrying Reality?

Today, I read this very interesting article on @SocialMediaToday that highlights the issues surrounding teenagers and social media, particularly on the appeal of temporary and anonymous Apps. Current trending social media networks and tools that fall into this category include SnapChat, Kik, Line, WhatsApp, Omegle, and many more, which I believe most of us would not even have heard of. So why exactly are these Apps so popular with teenagers?

The writer points out that the main reason for such behavior is that teenagers in these days are placing a much higher premium on their privacy, preferring to keep their social media interactions within their inner circles and cliques, and further away from their parents. (Just like how teenagers value their personal spaces, but in the online environment) Hence, such Apps clearly allow them to do so.

Personally, I feel that the appeal of such Apps could also be strongly attributed to their anonymity-nature, as teenagers could enjoy the thrill of posting stuff that they would not normally share, and communicating in a manner which they would not dare to do so in the physical world. This provides the freedom for them to act, behavior and explore many things without any consequences.

Of course, the biggest problem of this is that such Apps could also provide an unchecked, and therefore ideal environment for predators to lurk on such platforms where they can easily exploit the naivety of teenagers. So it is important that parents take actions and educate their children on the effects of such tools. Below is a very useful infographic put together by Rawhide.Org on the facts of the matter, and ways to tackle the issues.    



Source: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/temporary-and-anonymous-apps-whats-teen-appeal-infographic