learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Putting Things in Context - Designing Social Media for
Education
Jon Dron, Terry Anderson and George Siemens
TEKRI, Athabasca University, Canada
jond@athabascau.ca
terrya@athabascau.ca
gsiemens@athabascau.ca
Abstract: The rich promise of social software in formal education can be offset by a clash between hierarchical
organisational structures and the bottom-up, distributed nature that characterizes network development and
growth. Learners often experience confusion when using social networking systems within formal education
systems, negating many of the potential benefits of sharing, collaboration, communication and personal
ownership associated with social networking systems. This often leaves learners and their teachers lost or at
least disorientated in social space. Social networking systems are mainly based on explicit individual social
connections, while students and staff in academia constantly shift between overlapping but delineated
hierarchically organised community contexts like classes, committees, research groups, centres and schools as
well as less formal person-to-person networks. Each context presents different needs for communication, shared
resources and connectivity. Most existing educational social software systems blur these contexts into a single,
confused and confusing sub-optimal space that is neither fully social and user controlled nor fully institutionally
controlled. In this paper we describe a set of partial solutions that we are evolving for the Elgg system, providing
multi-faceted profiles for both users and groups to allow control of content, presentation and audience for shared
artefacts, catering for different social, organisational and personal/group contexts. A facet is represented as a
page comprised of draggable widgets. Unlike the static views often associated with e-portfolios, these facets can
be interactive, inviting comment, assessment and other responses in specific contexts. Facets can be moulded to
fit the shifting contexts of academic activities and leisure lives, thus reducing the confusion of network, group, set
and personal spaces that besets current social software use in education, without losing the personal control,
sociability and ownership that makes it valuable in the first place.
Keywords: social media, higher education, technology-enhanced learning
1. Introduction
We and others (Dron and Anderson, 2009a; Ford et al., 2011; Sebastion et al., 2009) have observed
the enormous potential of social media (including but not limited to blogs, file sharing, link sharing,
social tagging, wikis, social networking, microblogging) to enable methods, pedagogies and forms of
learning that earlier technologies have failed to support. A clear set of affordances makes their use
compelling, including:
Content
Sharing of found and created objects
Emergence of patterns, computer augmented and visible
Authenticity as education activity aligns with business and social activity
Connection
Discovery of others with whom to learn
Leveraging networks that go beyond the formal classroom or workplace community
Serendipity as networks and sets interconnect
Sustainance of sociability with a positive association of social network use and traditional forms
of social contact (Hua Wang and Wellman, 2010)
Control
Empowerment to be both a reader and a writer
Adaptability to varying needs due to flexible and mashable (soft) technologies
Communication
Collaborating in teams and groups
Engagement and motivation brought on by persistence, visibility to and interaction with others
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