We recently created a Group on Facebook for the Cecil B. Day Campus Habitat for Humanity Chapter. Within one week, there were 118 members.
Facebook is generally considered to be the leading social networking site among college students. With Facebook, individuals can create profiles that include personal interests, affiliations, pictures, and basically anything else that they want to post. The profile links the user to other people who have posted similar information. For example, you can find and display all users who list the same favorite movie that you did. Since a social networking site provides a number of ways for users to interact and constantly creates connections among users, the appeal is obviously broad.
A technology like Facebook that can captivate so many students who can spend large amounts of time using it, I think, offers us an opportunity to incorporate it into teaching and learning. One of the first things that we need to do, I believe, is to try to understand the components of social networking that students find so compelling. Obviously in Facebook, there are a lot of distractions and not everything is relevant or pedagogically useful. Remember also, that we should not incorporate technology into teaching and learning efforts just because it is uber-cool. The technology needs to aid learning.
I have begun to think about ways that we may use Facebook and social networking to assist with learning and teaching. Facebook certainly emphasizes to students the importance of creating content. The student user is encouraged to formulate profiles that communicate and express who they are and that highlight their talents and experience. The reflective side of it may be the most important part.
There are many questions that come to mind about incorporating this technology into teaching and learning. For example, how is the information flow in social networking best managed. Many of us who are Facebook users find that it can become overwhelming very quickly. Much of the information seems like “noise.” In the F2F classroom, we and students generally know how to deal with that. But is it different in the online environment?
Here are a few other questions.
How do people now use Facebook in their professional lives? Do we need to help student pharmacists begin to learn how it will be able to help them to grow once they graduate?
How might social networks relate to personal learning and to formal learning?
Will the ease of surrounding oneself with only those who have similar interests potentially limit the exposure to new ideas and experiences for a student?
It seems to me that since Facebook (and other social networking) is used and accepted by students, then we need to find ways to develop innovative pedagogical uses and encourage students to become engaged participants in learning through their online connections.
I would like to hear your thoughts about the possibility of using social networking systems like Facebook in teaching situations. How would you respond to these first questions that I pose? What additional questions should we be thinking about? I look forward to a conversation about this.
3 comments:
How many people actually use facebook for professional reasons? The only person I know of is a realtor. What about networking sites that are geared more towards professional life such as linkedin? Perhaps building a profile on one of these sites will be more useful long term.
Kathryn, is this something that we should be talking about with students? Will social networking of any type be needed/useful in a persons professional life?
http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=2848
Follow the link above to a "debate" about the use of social networking in business and the subsequent comments. An interesting pattern emerged in the comments that mirrored my own experience: namely, that setting up your facebook or linked in profile is time consuming. If you that's all you've done so far with either, you will see few if any results or benefits for a lot of time invested and you will conclude that it's just not worth it for business, pleasure or teaching. However, if you stick with it and give it a few minutes a day - it gets easier.
What Facebook allows you to do, which is lost in the bNET discussion, is to build and maintain relationships - mostly with people you already know, not just socialize with strangers or sellers or buyers. The relationship, the ability to communicate easily and quickly with your friends all over the world as if they lived on your street and you ran into them on the sidewalk while checking your mail (paper mail, not email), is the hook of Facebook for many. Sites like Facebook seem to build a sense of community and connectedness that is missing in much of modern America.
Now, how do you tap into that characteristic of community and connectedness for higher education purposes? Obviously, we can definitely use it for social events and activities on campus and beyond. Using it for learning is not as clear and will take some experimentation. In HBRs Breakthrough Ideas of 2008: The future of “experts” is clouded by the rise of “wisdom of the crowd.” Perhaps there's a way to build on the knowledge and wisdom of our students in ways that ultimately improve their ability to provide quality, patient-centered care. This is an approach that I find interesting, and I'm quite sure there are many others out there and many that haven't even been thought of yet.
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