Group items tagged

Tess (2013) provides a great review of the literature on the role of social media in the higher education context. Tess (2013) suggests that as instructors look for ways to incorporate technology to mediate and enhance their instructions as well as promote active learning among students, they increasingly turn to different social media tools. The author argues that the current literature on the integration of social media in higher education are limited to self-reported data and content analyses. Therefore, he provides a summary of literature on the role of social media in the higher education classroom as well as discusses their limitations. Various studies (cited below) explored the role of social media and SNSs in different contexts of education -teaching learning process. These studies have demonstrated interesting and useful results. Tess (2013), in addition to keyword-specific searches, used a "snowball" method for finding the articles from the relevant articles cited in the literature reviewed. To narrow the range of the review, he chooses articles on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blog and LinkedIn. Tess (2013) provides a brief definition of each of these five SNSs. He also looks at the social impact of these popular SNS tools. The author looks at the factors motivating the educators to use social media in higher education classrooms, such as: the changing nature of the student, the changing knowledge consumption relationship, and the de-emphasis of institutionally provided learning and emergence of "user-driven" education (Selwyn, 2010). The author provides platform-specific affordances and drawbacks in terms of their application in the higher education space. Tess (2013) argues that although the infrastructure to support social media's presence exists in most universities today, instructors have been slow in adopting the tool as an educational one. Those who are adopting are still likely in the experimental stage. He admits that his literature rev

Good journal for some articles on Web 2.0 use in higher education settings.

Survey (audience: higher ed librarians) about emerging technology use among students. [NOTE: Need to be logged in to FSU libraries to access/download full article)

This tool was created based on research that identified barriers higher ed instructors faced when incorporating social media into their classrooms. After completed some questions, the tool uses algorithms based on pedagogical principles to suggest tools, strategies and guidelines for incorporating social media in higher ed classrooms.

Reynol Junco is a faculty member/researcher who focuses on social media. This is his blog. 

Good on you for just contacting him! I've yet to meet him, but have (obv.) read his work.

Cool Blog! Thanks for sharing. I wonder why the above link says to his blog says 0 views, I clicked on it and went to the site, so that should be at least one view! I am also assuming Abigail clicked on the link too, although she may be already ready following the blog since she already a fan of him!

Thought this article might be of interest to you -- especially as we consider Web 2.0 and formal learning. You can get it from the FSU library if you're logged in. If you don't know how to log in for distance library access, look at the top right of the library home page for the link. Ask Vanessa or Shuang if you need help.

Just found this journal and it just might be of interest to some of you. Articles on CoP in higher ed, teaching with wikis ...

Thanks for sharing this journal! Just when I wanted to learn more about this topic :)

Shuang, check out the first issue -- I want to read every single article in that one (and downloaded them all). Think I'll start with the Engstrom one.

As a person who crafts and post their personal work on the web, I appreciate the focus on copyright and personal intellectual property information shared in this article. It is a mazing how many people and businesses "borrow" ideas from others without giving credit.

Lots of tools we've already discussed, plus some others (not all Web 2.0).

AI in higher ed admissions. "With Bolt, enrollment managers and marketers can focus their attention on prospects who are more likely to enroll, conserving time and effort for resource-strapped schools hit hard by the pandemic. Bolt uses behavioral data, which is 20 times more predictive than artificial intelligence that relies on demographics alone."

Tagging because I want to read it, but thought some of you might be interested as well.

Interesting piece. I've heard lots about the debate over scholarship versus service, and thought that Bessette's analogy to blogging as service was fascinating. Knowledge sharing may not be scholarship in the traditional sense, but it certainly plays an important role in pushing higher education forward, so maybe it should be considered a real part of a scholar's contributions to the field.

I know some bloggers who are actively lobbying to consider their blogs as scholarship. Some have submitted archives as part of promotion dossiers. Generally, they're not at R1 universities -- although there are plenty of R1 scholars who see how blogging and other social media interactions can enhance their scholarship via promoting their work and building their networks. And many have also talked about the effect it has had on their writing. I think I'll blog about that sometime in the next week.

In this article, two Australian researchers investigated whether Twitter can be used to foster enhanced student engagement within a university level sport marketing course. 68 students participated in the study. 59% of the class did not have an existing Twitter account and had to sign up for one to participate in the study. There were two aspects of Twitter user during the course. First, students would participate in two discussion lectures, which was structured much the same as a Twitter chat, with questions posted in advance of the actual discussion. The second aspect was to regularly post contemporary issues in sport marketing that coincided with the course content. Much like EME 6414, students used a hashtagged course code to be able to track the activity and respond to their classmates. I thought it was interesting that the researchers explicitly advised existing Twitter users that they did not have to censor their regular Twitter activity, as the instructor would only follow the course hashtag. This appears to be a clear acknowledgement of the potential for context collapse when social media is incorporated into an educational setting. Questionnaires were administered to broadly measure aspects of student engagement. The results suggest that Twitter was effective in the university classroom as engagement levels increased over the semester. Twitter made it easier for students to connect with both the instructor and other students and extend that connection beyond the lecture time in the classroom. These networking tools also allow students to take on a more active role in the co-creation of the course content. I think this is one of the most significant advantages of incorporating social networking elements into the classroom. The biggest limitations of the study were its small sample size and homogeneous population. Future studies should include more students from various disciplines.

It took me a very long time to find the comment button to add another thought to my original post. Not nearly as noticeable as other discussion platforms. Anyway...I wanted to add that this article was very appropriate right now because the TA for EME 5608 is currently conducting research on a very similar topic, specifically "when and how social media apps like Instagram are used by students (without instructor participation) to support social interaction and build social connections in online courses." I know some of you are also in that course and I'm curious what your opinions are on the experiment? Do you think that interacting on Instagram has increased your social connections and added benefit to the learning experience?

It also took me a long time to find the comment button! You are not alone in that!

Just a preview version, but it is an interesting study describing how higher education students consider using Twitter as a classroom tool. The researchers examined results from undergraduate student usage in their class settings.

This was interesting... students who were heavy users of social media did not spend less time studying - so social media is neutral on grades on that point. Students who are on social media about what they are studying have slightly higher grades.