THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN EDUCATION
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ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2012 was a great success and featured three outstanding sessions that focused on the role of social media in education both inside and outside the classroom.
Though these sessions differed in style, and their speakers came from varied fields, each presenter illustrated different ways in which social media is being used to enhance education and create a range of opportunities for both students and teachers alike.
By Matthew Labrooy
The social media theme began with Enhancing Participatory Culture: How to Design International Collaboration with Social and Mobile Media? Ilona Buchem along with three of her students demonstrated their work as part of the ‘Icollaborate project’ in which they used Mahara, a social media platform, to aggregate the produced content, document their findings, blog their opinions and importantly receive peer feedback from other students all over the world.
It was discovered that though Mahara was a ‘new media’ for all students, it operated similar to many of the more popular social websites, thus it was easy for students to assimilate themselves into documenting and sharing their projects on this platform. The students were positive about the use of Mahara and, in particular the ability to receive praise and constructive criticism from other students of diverse cultures, which was seen as hugely motivating and important. The initiative is to be replicated in future programs at Beuth University.
The next session to provide commentary on the use of social media in education was Facebook for Education: Passing or Failing the Test? This session discussed the successes as well as the dangers of students using social media as part of their education.
Providing a valuable presentation of ‘lessons learned’ Colin Gray of Edinburgh University explained how instead of using an existing social network such as Facebook, a social network called ‘Napier Exchange’ was built, so students and teachers could collaborate and share. While similar to Facebook it allowed teacher and students also to blog, create wiki’s, share documents and have discussion groups. Napier Exchange has had unprecedented success, in particular with the rich student-teacher discussions.