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May 14, 2009
Social nets — a communication tool or a distraction?
For better or worse, I’ve had a Facebook page since early 2005. I specifically set it up so I could get a feel for the experience and to determine how much, if any, pedagogical benefit existed in what was then becoming one of the primary social networking destinations for many of my students. In the beginning, the answer was “not much.” Since then, Facebook has become the primary social networking website for not only students, but for internet users in general.
Facebook recently announced that they signed up their 200 millionth active user worldwide, handily trouncing LinkedIn’s 38 million members and MySpace’s 130 million members. For students at almost all levels, and more recently for adults who spend time online, social networking websites have grabbed a large percentage of total online time. None of this is surprising; it would be surprising if I could actually find a single student in any of my classes who did not have a Facebook page.
Today I receive more in e-mail communications from students via Facebook than from the university’s e-mail system. If I neglect to update my status for several days, I get messages asking me,
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Whether we like it or not, Facebook has joined other pedagogical technologies such as content management systems like Blackboard, presentation technologies such as PowerPoint and podcasting, and the ever-popular clickers.
FACEBOOK AND GRADES
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, dated April 24, 2009, Jeffrey R. Young writes, “Ms. Karpinski, a doctoral student in the university’s college of education, surveyed 102 undergraduates and 117 graduate students at Ohio State last summer and fall. She said Facebook users reported GPA’s in the 3.0-to-3.5 range, while nonusers reported GPA’s between 3.5 and 4.0. And she found that nonusers reported spending more time studying than the Facebook users did.”
Critics were quick to point out flaws in Ms. Karpinski’s research, including the small size of her sample pool. The author herself admitted that her work represented “a really basic study” and that, while it shows correlation, this does not imply causation. But it does raise some interesting questions. To the extent that social networks like Facebook have become a de facto channel for communication between students and instructors, do these networks enhance the level of interaction between students and instructors, or are they simply another distraction? More specifically, are we increasing the level of student engagement by utilizing social networks or does this simply add more background noise, ultimately de-focusing students from the tasks at hand?
TWITTERING
Now add the Twitter phenomenon to the mix
. Unless you’ve been living on a remote island for the past six months, you know that Twitter is the latest craze in social networking. The total number of active Twitter accounts has increased exponentially over the past year, rising from approximately 4,000,000 to nearly 10,000,000 worldwide between December 2007 and December 2008. It first became available in March 2006 (and, yes, I established an account in late March of that year), and initially appeared to be a glorified instant messaging system. Each entry, or “tweet,” is a message that is limited to 140 characters and can be transmitted on the web, via SMS text messaging on a cell phone, or via any one of a number of dedicated Twitter applications. Early adopters of Twitter seemed content to just narrate their lives, 140 characters at a time. But late in 2008, a couple of things changed.
Internet entrepreneurs began using Twitter to promote their products and services to other users. News organizations like CNN posted breaking headlines as tweets. Recently, Twitter users have begun adding hash tags to their posts, allowing individual tweets to be searched by topic. And yes, spammers have begun setting up Twitter accounts, although Twitter’s 100 percent opt-in format makes it a relatively ineffective channel for spam.
Today Twitter appears to be more a platform for micro-blogging than for instant messaging. Seen in that light, it may have some pedagogical value as an immediate communications channel for students and teachers to share discoveries and insights. Lately I’ve taken to posting links to relevant news articles I find on the web to Twitter, as well as to our university’s content management system. The benefit to me as a teacher is time-saving — posting a link and a sentence describing its relevance on Twitter takes far less time than does logging into the content management system, navigating to the class folder, finding an appropriate place to post, and composing and e-mail to students notifying them that I’ve posted something they should read.
BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY
The downside of this method is that currently only half of my students have Twitter accounts. But last semester only a quarter had accounts, and during the previous semester the percentage of my students on Twitter was in the low single digits. At this point Twitter is still very much an experiment for me, and it is clearly unsuitable for anything that represents required reading. Yet it shows promise as another method of engaging students outside the classroom.
A recent seminar I attended included a panel of students who were asked which of the teaching technologies currently in vogue they preferred. To a person, their answer was that it doesn’t matter. Students today are wired and connected to their friends, their classes, and their faculty in ways we could not have imagined just a few years ago. The jury is still out on the engagement versus distraction issue, but given that instructors compete with a wide variety of media distractions anyway, we may be better off getting on board the train than standing on the track shouting “Stop!”
Steve Cunningham is a senior lecturer in technology in the Thornton School, Music Industry Department at USC. He can be reached at voicetalent@mac.com.
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