Using Social Media for Learning (SM4L

“If the Mountain Will
Not Come…”: Using
Facebook and Twitter as
Learning Management
Systems

Virtual Poster
Session by
Jessica Critten

Introduction: Why Social Media in the
Classroom?
The Pew Internet and American Life Project report that
86% of undergraduate students use social networking
sites. Faculty members surveyed by Faculty Focus found
that 58% of students using laptops in the classroom were
on Facebook when they weren’t supposed to be. Those
percentages are more than likely not surprising to anyone.
The fact is, students are using social media in the
classroom whether we want them to or not. How the
instructor approaches this situation is reflective of their
pedagogy (and there is nothing wrong with that!); I
choose to explore the possibilities inherent in social
media, a communication sphere in which students are
already deeply invested.

Why Facebook and Twitter as an LMS?
UWG’s Learning Management System (LMS) is
CourseDen, for which students (and faculty) have
expressed dislike. In an interview with the Chronicle of
Higher Education, instructional technologist Jim Groom
finds issue with the traditional LMS as a general idea,
arguing that it, “really encloses space, and it encloses the
possibility of the Web.”

I agreed; in CourseDen, as with other LMS’s with which
I’ve worked, communication seems one-sided between
the instructor and the student (or the other way around.)
Class discussions are localized to the CourseDen
discussion board, communication between group
members is slow and cumbersome, and projects that are
submitted for a grade can only be seen and commented
on by the instructor.

Why Facebook LMS con’t
Facebook in particular, I believed, would “open up” class
interaction to the rest of the world. I hoped that by putting
students in these familiar spaces they would feel more
comfortable engaging in a dynamic conversation; the tone of
Facebook is much less intimidating than the tone of a school-
sponsored LMS. I also hoped that for assignments that
involved multimedia there would be less of a learning curve
with uploading and annotating projects on Facebook than
there would have been on CourseDen. I envisaged our
Facebook class page as a space where students could show off
the hard work they’d put into projects to their fellow students
(and whoever else was interested) and that the quality of their
work would increase through an on-going process of peer
feedback.

Why Twitter as an LMS con’t
Twitter is an incredibly versatile tool that I
decided to use conservatively the first time
around, to get a sense of how students would
use it organically. I thought that this platform
would require more of a learning curve (and I
was right!) but that it would be valuable as a
way for students to learn how to use what is
becoming an increasingly important social
media tool, not to mention how to thoughtfully
and succinctly express themselves.

The Pedagogy, or, “Why are we using
this?”:
The general consensus about the use of technology is education
is that technology should support pedagogy, not hijack it. In
other words, the question should be: how does one use
technology to facilitate learning, not how does one learn how to
use technology.

This is not as much the case with using social media in the
classroom such as I have, where, as Marshall McLuhan famously
notes, “the medium is the message.” A study of social media is
inherently a study of the technology that supports this virtual
participation because in this figuration, the container becomes
intertwined with the content. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has
said that there is no meaning without representation; the way
we consume information—the way information is presented to
us--informs how we construct our understanding of it.

The Pedagogy, or, “Why are we using
this?”:
Certainly social media is useful in the classroom to more easily
facilitate conversation and participation—and I have
unapologetically used it as such—but this approach cannot be
divorced from a discussion of the function and impact of
social media as a technology and a communication circuit. As
such, before I used social media in the classroom, I wanted to
have a session to pre-emptively answer the question, “Why
are we using this?” (I’ve never had a student ask this question,
but I wish they would!)

This is a question we should all ask ourselves before we use
any kind of social media: Why are we using this? Why is this
better than what we are doing now? How will this expand the
student’s learning of both the media and the message?

Social Media Literacy
I found my pedagogical approach to using social media in the
classroom in Howard Rheingold’s work about participative pedagogy
and social media literacy. He has written extensively about this, but
arguably the culmination of this work is in his Social Media Classroom,
a free and downloadable LMS replacement that integrates social
media into the online learning experience.
In the article he published in the Educause Review (which was the
main inspiration for my discussion of social media literacy) “Attention,
and Other 21st Century Literacies” Rheingold underscores the
interconnectedness of technology and content of social media—it is
not enough to know how know the basics of the technology, or how
to read and write. To use social media effectively and meaningfully,
you have to know how to use both in concert, and you learn this by
become social media literate. I adapted his five identified literacies
(Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Network Awareness and
Critical Consumption) to fit the subject of my class (library research)
and my population (first year undergraduate students.)

• I start with defining social media literacy; of
the many definitions I’ve found for this
concept, the one I like the most is Karen
Tillman’s:
• “…social media literacy is having the
proficiency to communicate appropriately,
responsibly, and to evaluate conversations
critically within the realm of socially-based
technologies.”

The first literacy I discuss is Reputation
Management, which encompasses privacy and
personal branding. Rheingold discusses this in
passing, but I felt it was important to be talked
about specifically in my class of first-year
students who, I’ve found, have relatively little
concept (or interest!) of how their online
personas are perceived.

The second literacy I discuss is Critical
Thinking/Crap Detection which Rheingold addresses
in depth. This literacy especially resonated in my
class, as his approach to deciding whether or not
something was trustworthy online is the same as
our class discussions of evaluating scholarly and
popular resources. This literacy is useful in a
discussion of social media, but also in a discussion
of the transferability of research-related skills to
different media.

The last literacy I discuss—Network
Awareness—conflates Rheingold’s collaboration,
participation, and network awareness literacies.
The ultimate goal of our discussion of this
literacy is to underscore the ways that social
media empowers users to become active
producers of information, and contributors to
ongoing and important conversations.

The Assignments (Facebook)
• Students were asked to use Facebook as a discussion board to respond
to the following prompt:

• Please listen to this episode of On the Media: "The Facebook Show":
http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/feb/03/
As a citizen of the nation of Facebook (or "Facebookistan"), what are
your rights and responsibilities? In light of our discussion of social
media literacy, what does it mean to be social media literate on
Facebook specifically?
To apply our discussion in a practical way, this week I want you to use
our class Facebook page as your discussion forum to 1. Turn our
"conversation into an interactive dialogue 2. Be a producer, not just a
consumer of information and 3. Think critically about what you say and
what you accept as true in social media environments.

Facebook—Learning Outcomes
• Learning Outcomes:
--Students will analyze social media as an information
source by using social media platforms to create new
information
--Students will evaluate their roles and responsibilities as
producers of information, understanding how social media
operates as a public forum
• I wanted students to actively and critically reflect on
how they create and consume information in social
media environments, in keeping with our discussion of
social media literacy. I hoped that students would begin
to consider Facebook as a type of information source.

Findings: Facebook
• Despite what I had hoped, there was still an initial learning
curve commensurate with the learning curve associated
with the use of an LMS; Students were unsure about how
to access the course site (which had a friendly URL) and
some had a slight difficulty uploading materials to the
Facebook page. These issues may have stemmed from the
fact that their first Facebook assignment was also their first
major assignment for the course, and they were unsure
about my expectations and/or afraid to do something
wrong. This assignment was also introduced before our
discussion of Social Media Literacy, so students did not
understand why we were going to use Facebook in the
classroom, and may have been uncomfortable with their
personal communication environment mixing with their
educational environment.

Findings: Facebook
• I believe the second Facebook assignment was much more successful
because it was used in concert with our larger class discussion of social
media literacy. Students used Facebook as a discussion board and as a
whole posted more thoughtful and in-depth posts and responses than
they did in their discussion boards on CourseDen. As per our social media
literacy framework, I wanted students to think critically about their
branding, their networks, and their roles as producers and consumers of
information. As a whole, students seemed to “get it”: One student wrote
that she used to Facebook to communicate with her personal networks
and used Twitter to express her personal opinions; she recognized that
she sought out different networks in different spaces, and both
consumed and produced different kinds of different information in
different social media settings.
• Overall, these two assignments underscored the need to put the
educational usage of social media in a pedagogical context—students do
not automatically respond to the use of social media because they are
familiar with it, or they think it is fun. They want to know why we use it.

Tips for teaching with Facebook
• Start a new Facebook account for use in your classes, and encourage
your students to do the same if they feel uncomfortable using their
personal accounts. Do not feel compelled to friend your students on this
account, you can easily interact with them on your group or page.
• Use a Facebook group if you want students to be able to easily see
when your class site is updated. Use a Facebook page if you want your
class site to look more professional.
• Make use of Facebook as a place to share links, photos, and videos.
• Give students a clear idea about your expectations for their work, and
set boundaries. The informality of the space can elicit overly familiar
interactions.
• Facebook is useful (and fun) as a discussion board. Encourage students
to respond to prompts in individual posts so their work can be
responded to more directly (and threads of responses can get unwieldy)
• Encourage your students be proactive in their use of the site by posting
questions of their own, or links to relevant information. You want them
to drive the content of the page as much, if not more, than you do.

The Assignments (Twitter)
• Students were encouraged to use Twitter
throughout the semester to communicate with
group members or me. Their formal assignment
was to tweet feedback to their fellow classmates
for two group presentations.

• Students were allowed to use their personal
accounts or start an account for classroom use.
We had a class hashtag (#uwglibr1101) that
students were supposed to use for all class-related
communication.

Twitter: Learning Outcomes
• Learning Outcomes:
--Students will evaluate their roles and responsibilities as
producers of information, understanding how social media
operates as a public forum
--Students will explore methods to communicate effectively and
efficiently using technology
• This assignment was designed to help students think critically
about how they use social media to communicate. I hoped
the experience of creating information on Twitter in a
structured educational context would help students express
themselves more effectively in social media environments. I
also wanted students to be exposed to the possibilities
Twitter presents to contribute to important conversations
outside of the classroom.

Twitter: Findings
• As I expected, there was a learning curve for using Twitter in the
classroom. Because of this, I built in an opportunity for students to
experiment with Twitter in a low-pressure situation before they used
it for a grade. As a result, there were no reported problems or
complaints with using it in the classroom and when given an option
to do a different method of peer-review for the revised
presentations, students overwhelmingly chose to use Twitter again.
• A fellow librarian used Twitter as a way for students to give peer
feedback in a previous semester and was disappointed with the
outcome, so I was initially wary to do it in my class. To hopefully
counteract too-short, inappropriate, or shallow responses I made
sure to give students ample examples of what constituted an
acceptable response, and was overall very pleased with the level of
constructive and thoughtful criticism the students tweeted. Overall,
students performed better when they had a better idea of my
expectations, and a better idea of the utility of the technology.

Twitter: Findings
• For these presentations, students also had to do an anonymous paper peer-
review where there were encouraged to go into more detail, and the concise
responses they provided on Twitter were just as, if not more, helpful; Students
noted that they felt more accountable in their Twitter responses, and Twitter
created an almost competitive environment in which they wanted to provide
more substantive feedback because they knew their fellow classmates were
reading the things they wrote.
• As a part of this assignment, students were asked to help revise the grading
rubric for the revised presentations. This served as a helpful (if anecdotal)
assessment for our usage of Twitter, because in evaluating what they thought
made for a “good” feedback tweet, they were also indicating to me what kind
of information they thought was appropriate and effective for this medium of
communication.
• Even though the idea of using Twitter was to reach out to other networks and
situate oneself in a larger context of information sharing, students were
relatively siloed with their classmates. This is largely a failure in the design of
the assignment; in future semesters, I’ll add a requirement that they join an
ongoing related conversation outside of the class discussion.

Tips for teaching with Twitter
• Create an easy to remember hashtag for your course, and repeat it
often.
• As you would with any assignment, give students a clear idea of your
expectations for their tweets--the brevity of the conversations can elicit
too-short and shallow responses. Get them invested in giving quality
responses by having them help you construct a rubric, or identifying
what they think is a quality tweet for an example.
• Make your twitter conversations structured by giving students questions
to respond to. Remember that your students only have 140 characters,
so keep your questions specific and directed.
• Use twitter to communicate with your students: tweet reminders of
assignment deadlines, give kudos to good work and conversations, post
links to relevant videos or articles
• Hashtags expire in about 10 days, so find a way to archive your tweets. (I
use Hootsuite.)

Using Social Media for Learning (SM4L

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