ICTlogy

Neil Selwyn
Social media, social learning? Considering the limits of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary educational technology.

It has become very difficult to talk about the Internet without talking about social media: the default will be social.

What are the key features of social media and what is their significance to contemporary education and learning? How are social media applications currently being used in education and/or by learners? What are the limitations — if any — of these new media in the educational field? What changes does education need to perform to adapt to the new social media landscape?

Internet applications have also transformed the concept of authorship: massive amounts of people create, share, distribute, remix content all the time, most of the times unintentionally or tacitly. There is now mass socialisation and mass participation. Internet

Different (philosophical) points of view on social media

• Increase informality
• Increase individualism, decentralizes power.
• Increases collectivism, is the group using a common shared tool.

Social media and education:

• Engaging: students like social media, so why should not education be using it?
• Empowering: anyone can create content, learn, etc.

Social media and educational institutions:

• Implies a deep reorganisation of educational institutions, making them more fluid, flexible.
• Can imply the replacement of educational institutions.

Social media as a context for learning: inquiry, collaboration, publication, literacy. But this hardly works within the boundaries of institutions. There still is a limited institutional use of social medial.

On the other hand, there are uneven levels of social media interest, access and usage amongst students. The “digital native” is a myth: there are (HJargittai & Hsieh, 2010) omnivores, devotees, samplers dabblers and non-users; or (Eynon & Mamlberg, 2011) active participators, all-rounders, normatives and peripherals. And social media is not levelling the ground, but just the contrary.

There also is a commodified nature of social media use. What you do on social media becomes a commodity: it is more important not what you did, but how many people liked it or followed it, how many people gave value to it… but you. And this affects people’s behavior.

And what happens with non-participation? Not to speak about the quality of participation: There is the usual rule of thumb of 1% people creating, 9% engaging/commenting and 90% just watching.

So, what should we do?

Are there differences in social media as a ‘learning technology’ as opposed to a ‘living technology’?
how do the creative, communal an productive practices and activities associated with social media fit with the practices and activities that are dominant in educational settings?<7p>

How could the educational community be better involved in shaping forms of social media along different, more educationally-orientated lines?

Juana M. Sancho-Gil
Technological affluence, educational precariousness: a look at the last 20 years.

In the recent 20 years of instructional technology, everything that was said on technology belongs now to archaeology of technology, while what was said about pedagogy stands actual.

Some technologies are certainly not addressed to fulfil some existing needs, but do actually create new needs that come to existence once the new technology is widely adopted.

Do we understand everything that is happening in the field of technology?
Can we process all the information that is now available, that is now getting to us?
Who is the expert that will help us in finding a way through new technologies and information?
Certainly not today’s education, inflexible and aimed at marks and not learning.

New learners have multiple sources of information, and thus, they have new ways of learning. How is the educational system adapting to this new landscape? What should the educational system be doing?

Some initiatives:

• EdITLib
• Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) – Schooling for Tomorrow
• Innovative Learning Environments
• Escuela 2.0

Some of these initiatives — the latter, for instance — are suspicious of being more a technological initiative rather than a pedagogical one, which poses many issues on its legitimacy, its suitability, its sustainability, its expected impact, etc.

What has actually changed in the last years in the school?

There has been a huge increase on assessment, especially based on standardized tests, with some “collateral damages” (Nichols and Berliner, 2007).

And we still think more in technological terms rather than on pedagogical terms, and many of these times to be able to control students: webcams in the classrooms, “check in” software to know whether the student attended class, etc. Of course, this does not mean that the teacher should not be digitally competent, which should.

In most recent years, this has been accompanied by a global crisis and budget cuts everywhere especially in education.

An agenda for the 21st century education

Encourage students to:

• Understand and responsible participate in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
• Continue learning throughout the whole life.
• Comprehend how knowledge interrelates. All knowledge is related to other knowledge(s).
• Be able to transfer knowledge and skills gained in one context into another one.

Some challenges to be met:

• Educate “symbolic analysts”.
• Consider the new forms of knowledge production, representation and transmission.
• Take into account the emergent contributions of the learning sciences and neurosciences regarding how people learn. And thus adapt our teaching to the findings of those disciplines, so to fit teaching with learning.
• Pay attention to the current diversification of ways and modalities of reading and writing (multiliteracies).
• Bear in mind learning experiences and a cultural background.

So, what technologies can help us in meeting these and other educational challenges?