Social Media for Instruction

As an instructor, I must admit that I have hesitated to use social media in my courses. My reasons for this align with those given in  the article by Gülbahar, et al. (2017); namely, that my own beliefs and fears about using social media tools for instruction prevented me from even trying in most cases, and succeeding on others. I did try to use Remind, which is an app that allows the instructor to communicate with students via text without having to give out a phone number. However, because I was nervous about making students us a tool like that, I made it optional. For that reason I couldn't use all of the features to their full potential.

The readings this week really helped to give me a different perspective on using social media on the classroom. One theme I noticed throughout the articles was the idea that social media should never be used just because it can be, but only because it fits the pedagogical framework of the course. I do feel that there are times when technology and social media tools are used because they are new and trendy, even when it isn't a good fit for the content or teaching method. In these cases, I have often felt that the use of those tools actually detracts from learning rather than supporting it. I think this is due to an issue that Dr. Dennen (manuscript in process) points out, which is that when the tool becomes the center of the design process, sometimes the learning objectives get lost in the attempt to make an interesting lesson using a cool new technology (p. 5). However, I think the guidelines laid out by Dr, Dennen, especially SCOPE,  as well as the social media toolkit built by Gülbahar, et al., can really help me select the appropriate tools and integrate them into my courses.

I went through the quiz on the social media toolkit website, https://socialmediaforeducation.org/, and found the results to be really helpful. Not only does it provide a ranking of the types of social media that might work for a course, but also a series of tips on how to use those tools. This is a site that I will definitely be using in the future as I design my own courses, as well as something that I will recommend to other instructors who might need this type of support.


References:

Dennen, V. P. (manuscript in progress). Instructional design and development for social media lessons.

Gülbahar, Y., Rapp, C., Kilis, S., & Sitnikova, A. (2017). Enriching higher education with social media: Development and evaluation of a social media toolkit. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i1.2656