Post #9 The Bottom Line

Is there a bottom line? Not yet, in my opinion.

Nicole Ellison, Dpt of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University explains the following regarding social networking tools:

There is very little published research.

There are some the potential benefits:

1. They are already integrated into students' daily practices.


2. They could require a higher level of engagement.


3. There is the potential to make identity information more salient during class discussions.


4. They add the social peer-to-peer component.


5. They require digital literacy skills.

She also mentions some concerns with Fb's integration into formal learning:

1. Accountability to the university (privacy, archiving, etc).


2. Exposure to advertising.


3. What about the non-users?


4. Reshaping of instructor-student relationship.


5. Student resistance.

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ECR0713.pdf

Future considerations:

Perhaps the main concern for educators with social networking is that students may be sitting at their computers in study mode but spending a proportion of their time socialising online instead... Online interaction probably also plays an important social support role, perhaps especially for students who are unconfident with face-to-face communication or have difficulty socialising outside their home due to family responsibilities or mobility problems. Hence, whilst social networking is probably helpful to some students and a time consuming distraction to others, it is not yet clear which is most significant. Hence it may be useful to discuss with students the importance of monitoring and moderating the time spent social networking. Nevertheless, social networking sites are widely used fun computing environments, so can we take advantage and find some useful educational applications?http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/e_article000993849.cfm

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, poses some questions about students today and their perceptions on scholarly and academic related work within the context of social networking tools that in my opinion will need to be answered in the near future: Tech-savvy students, who live and breathe information sharing, are critical to changing the way scholarly communication is conducted. Not bound by traditional modes of research exchange, students are using all the technologies at their disposal to engage in scholarly discourse - including blogs, wikis and tagging tools. What will they do next? How do they view the future of scholarly exchange? http://www.arl.org/sparc/

I would like very much to continue researching this topic - which it is obviously still an undiscovered and lightly-researched area. One of the reasons being that faculty themselves are just now starting to discover these tools as potential instructional and pedagogiacl resources.

Research has been conducted to find out how these tools are applied in areas such as business, medical, and social, but little has been documented in terms of how it applies to education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking

Perhaps I will find that social networking has no room in the classroom, but maybe I will also uncover some benefitial applications.