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Microblogging: making the case for social networking ineducation

In the last post in the Technology in Modern Foreign Languages series, I set outto make a case for the use of social networking in education based on my ownexperience using microblogging with my classes over the past year.

According to Wikipedia, microblogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allowsusers to send short text updates or micromedia such as photos, video or audio clips andpublish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosenby the user. The fact that these updates can be sent to a restricted group is an essentialconsideration in the context of education and online safety. Essentially, microblogging isthe purpose for which the vast majority of students use social networking sites such asFacebook, MySpace or, increasingly, microblogging services such as Twitter.

In the absence of an institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), socialnetworking online can be used as an extension to classroom teaching and as a tool toencourage communication and inquisitiveness among students, with the overarchingobjective of enhancing teaching and learning of by improving both teacher-student and

student-student communication, and, in so doing, bridging the home-school divide.

http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=1727http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=1727http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogginghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual%20learning%20environmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogginghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual%20learning%20environmenthttp://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=1727http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=1727

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The advent of what we adults call Web 2.0 -I say this because, to our students, Web 2.0is the web- has brought us a myriad of tools with considerable educational potential thatthe education establishment would be unwise to overlook or disparage. Old fashioned ICT-word processing, powerpoint presentations and desktop applications in general- has oftenbeen demonstrated to motivate students.

However, the bright, colourful, engaging and intuitive world of Web 2.0 has opened newpossibilities to encourage creativity (photo and video sharing and editing sites), promoteparticipation (social networking sites) and improve access to information (social book-marking sites) in ways which we are only beginning to understand. Sharing andcollaborating can be redefined as the main characteristics of the whole Web 2.0phenomenon, as opposed to its earlier, more static incarnation.

There is no doubt that, although my students might be blissfully unaware of the term Web2.0, they are all familiar with the concept behind it: creating content, sharing, collaboratingand networking online. In fact, social networking online has rapidly become the principalmeans of communication for the current generation of teenagers.

Social networking is, after all, what they do on their mobile phones and other hand-helddevices under their desks when we teachers are not looking. This is what they do as soonas they get home from school.

Many will argue that most students are just wasting their time and gossiping online but,whatever anyones opinion on the benefits or dangers of social networking is, it cannot bedenied that they are all sharing, collaborating and networking and they are doing so in away which they enjoy and find engaging, otherwise they simply would not do it.

More and more people, not just our students, are becoming aware of the power of belonging to a network: each individual member contributes a small part, so that theresulting body of knowledge is much greater than that which any individual member couldhave amassed on their own. This is why the social internet has become so successful:

groups of people have clumped together forming networks, generally because of somesort of affinity or shared interest, and have started communicating and passing oninformation that matters to them. Social and Personal networks, fora, blogs andmicroblogs have become the narrow end of the funnel through which a seemingly chaoticmaelstrom of voices is poured, resulting in a steady flow of meaningful and relevantinformation.

My pupils may well not be consciously aware of this or familiar with the word thatdescribes the activity in which they love to engage: microblogging. However, they areextremely well versed with the concept the word microblogging encapsulates: brief updates, photo and video sharing, tagging and poking.

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They are communicating with each other on an unprecedented scale, spending more andmore time in front of a computer screen with multi-player games, email, the Internet andinstant messaging becoming an ever more integral part of their lives. The risingimportance and availability of online social networks and their popularity among youngpeople in particular cannot be dismissed, putting the use of ICT at the heart of 21st centuryinterconnectivity in all areas of society, not just education.

Pedagogy, in my opinion, needs to reflect these social changes and conform to the needsand expectations of todays students and, if we teach them in a way that mirrors how theylive their lives when they are not in school, if we help to ensure that the gap between their school life and real life is minimised, we then become better able to guarantee thecommitment and engagement of the vast majority of our students.

Motivation and engagement are often seen as the holy grail of language teaching. Lack of motivation resulting in disengagement continues to be a big problem for languageteachers, which helps to explain, in my view, why they have traditionally been earlyadopters of new technologies: first tapes and overhead projectors, then CDs, DVDs anddigital data projectors. More recently, widely available internet access has heralded thearrival of the next logical stage in the evolution of the language teacher: the connectedteacher.

My challenge was therefore to provide my students with the means to communicate with

their teachers and with each other in a way which they would find both attractive andnatural, fitting in with their technological expectations and making use of the skills theyalready possessed whilst, at the same, time adding value to their education.

Using a microblogging service which looked and felt like those already in use by mystudents would, in theory, allow teachers to enter their territory and continue to bringeducation to them wherever they happened to be through their computers and portabledevices. I felt it was important to bring access to language learning opportunities fromhome and, therefore, started to look for a way in which I could bridge the gap betweenschool and home (by home I really mean not school) by tapping into the potential offeredby social networking in terms of catalysing students interest, therefore making the most of the positive attitudes my students displayed towards Computer Mediated Communication(CMC).

Using ICT with a focus on the C for Communication is, in my view, the next logical stepand would allow us to bring the learning online and to blend the use of traditional toolssuch as textbooks or dictionaries with more up-to-date, relevant and authentic multimedia

materials from the web. Microblogging would provide teachers and students with aplatform in which they could interact beyond the constraints of the school walls, and withwhich the teacher could provide further personalised feedback and support.

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Effective use of ICT in education is, in my view, the key to personalised learning: itincreases learners access to resources and support and helps to motivate the mostreluctant learners to practise complex skills and achieve more than they would have donethrough other, more traditional means, thus benefiting those who do not generally do wellin formal contexts.

Being able to contact the teacher electronically and in private to ask for help or clarificationwithout fear of peer pressure or ridicule would help engage the hard-to-reach students andleaves the door wide open to new ways of personalising and differentiating tuition. On theother hand, those students who are engaged and doing well would relish the opportunity toobtain extension materials, designed to stretch the more able, delivered directly to their own social network wall in their computer screen.

After having considered using Facebook groups and Twitter, I opted for a specialistmicroblogging service named Edmodo , which had been designed to be used specificallyin an educational context. Twitter was discarded on the grounds that it offered a verylimited service of 140 character long messages sent to a group of users, called tweets , or direct messages of equal length sent to individual users. Facebook was rejected after consulting our students and arriving at the conclusion that they might see our use of Facebook for educational purposes as an intrusion into their privacy, therefore negatingany possible benefits obtained by using this medium. I got the distinct feeling that our students wanted to keep work and play separate.

Edmodo, on the other hand, was clearly for school work, an aspect which appealed greatlyto my students. However, it still looked and felt like their beloved Facebook. Upon signingup to the service students and teachers are told what the purpose of Edmodo is: Aprivate social platform for teachers and students to share ideas, files, eventsand assignments .

A distinction is also made upon signing up between students and teachers. Teachers areable to set up classes and groups (for which Edmodo generates a unique alpha-numericalcode) set and collect assignments, send alerts, link to online resources, attach documentsand embed audio visual material. When students log on to Edmodo for the first time, theyare prompted to enter the unique code generated for their class and thus both teacher andstudent accounts become linked and the can begin communication privately and safely.

My students immediately understood the purpose of Edmodo and embraced its simplicity,and ease of use. As it is often pointed out, a website should not make the user think as far as usability is concerned. However, the feedback we kept receiving again and again from

students was that Edmodo was just such a convenient service. Convenience, rather thanease of use, turned out to be the key to the adoption of Edmodo by my students as their

http://www.edmodo.com/http://www.edmodo.com/

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preferred means of keeping track of assignment deadlines and communication with their teacher.

Students, by and large, embraced Edmodo as a useful, time saving tool which helpedthem keep on top of their work and communicate with teachers when their help was most

needed, that is, when they were away from the classroom and were attempting to put thetheory learnt in the lessons into practice in their homework. In fact, being able to assesstheir work and answer their questions informally demonstrably increased their confidencein the subject and helped to secure their knowledge.

Two further aspects I would like to mention are the democratisation and personalisation of the learning experience. Firstly, through the use of a microblogging platform such asEdmodo, all students are given the opportunity to interact with the teacher outside anyperceived pressures and constraints which may be present in the classroom. This levelledthe playing field for those students who were less ready to shout out in lessons, fearedridicule or were, simply, less willing to participate in the open forum of a classroom.

Secondly, using microblogging in this way resulted in a more personalised experience for students, who felt individually supported by their teacher and, on occasion, also their peers. Personalisation also came in the form of being able to receive updates, remindersand notices from the classroom in their own computers or mobile devices which could beaddressed to the group or to individual students. Teaching and learning thus became

connected beyond the constrains of the school timetable.

Despite these apparent advantages, I often detect a strong sense of scepticism amongsome of my colleagues who see the implementation of tools such as Edmodo as acapitulation to what they perceive as a lack of discipline, absence of self-control andpreference for immediacy among the current generation of students. Students wanteverything now, instantly.

Upon further consideration, however, this appears hardly surprising, particularly given that

on the internet, for better or for worse, everything is just a click away, allowing them tofollow links where their interest takes them, pursuing multidimensional threads of information, often leading to learning outcomes that bear little resemblance to the originalobjectives, that is, the reason for the first click.

This, which is often perceived as a lack of focus rather than a new, perhaps better way tosynthesise information and therefore acquire knowledge, does go some way to explainwhy our generation of students struggle to write essays under controlled conditions usingpens and paper. It simply is not how they do things anymore, yet we still insist onassessing their work as ours was assessed and teaching them how we were taught.Understanding this might lead to the realisation that classroom pedagogy needs to be

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transformed and that we cannot continue teaching the way we want to teach, but rather the way our students want to learn.

My own view is that educators need to wake up to the needs and expectations of our students and reach a mutually acceptable compromise which would exploit the skills our

students already possess whilst safeguarding our pedagogical principles, without cavinginto a teenagers natural propensity to instant gratification and superficiality. These aretraits, lest we forget, that have been found in teenagers since time immemorial, and not

just among the current, often unfavourably portrayed and unfairly misrepresentedgeneration.

Perhaps what is familiar to our students feels threatening to teachers, given that we prefer to stay in control and we do not like our students being one step ahead of us. Perhaps wefear that we would not be able to control them in their territory: online.

Yet we cannot deny that the internet has undergone a revolution in terms of the servicesand possibilities it offers. It is no longer a static repository of information, in whichinformation flowed one way from the source to the recipient. Information nowadays flowsboth ways, as more and more websites encourage or even rely on two-waycommunication and the creation and sharing of content.

It is clear that better communication between school and home, between teachers and

students is, not only desirable, but also essential in a world in which technology iscontinually discovering and developing new, exciting and useful ways of improvingcommunication between people. In a sense, our students have tasted the proverbial honeyand the move towards this type of social interaction in the field of education is, in my view,inexorable. Educators would be unwise not to take advantage of their students willingnessto communicate and their desire to participate via this medium.