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What are the key features of social media and just what is their significance to contemporary higher education? How are social media applications currently being used in higher education settings? What changes does higher education need to make in order to remain relevant in the apparently fast-changing digital age?

"Of course, clear lines need to be drawn between the immediate practical tasks of developing forms of social media use that better fit within the current 'grammar' of formal higher education systems, and addressing the rather more difficult longer-term issues of system-wide reform and redesign. In terms of this latter point, there is a clear need to thoroughly consider and discuss what higher education is, and what forms it should take in a 21st-century digital age. Indeed, many of the controversies and tensions concerning the use of social media in higher education have little to do with the technology itself. Instead, these are issues that are driven by personal belief and opinion about 'the essentially ethical question [of] what counts' as worthwhile learning and worthwhile education (Standish, 2008: 351). In this sense, social media are socially disruptive technologies that prompt a range of deeply ideological (rather than purely technical) questions about the nature of institutionalized education."