Abigail Morris ENGL 7701 Project 4 Final

Abigail Morris

English 7701

Research Methods in TPC

Project 4

Brief Scenario: As an instructor of First Year Composition and Writing courses at East Carolina

University and a champion of the benefits of incorporating social media in course pedagogy, I

need to develop a sound understanding of what has been done, what is being done, and what can

be done to bring popular social media platforms into my basic curriculum as tools of

communication, collaboration, collection and reflection.

Question I seek to solve: What must I consider and be aware of while developing a curriculum

that incorporates social media as a tool for students in English 1100?

Writing Together:

Using Social Media to Teach Composition in College

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more

accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Andrew Sullivan

Twitter provides us with a wonderful platform to discuss/confront

societal problems. We trend Justin Bieber instead.

Lauren Leto

Introduction

The revolution will be digitized. I believe this because the latest generation of college and

university students has grown up in a fully digitized society, and, like it or not, instructors of

composition and writing courses will have to embrace this reality if they want to give their

students the best possible chance of succeeding in this increasingly digital world. This requires

meeting students where they are, and for many if not most students, that means not only in

digital spaces typically associated with education, such as platforms like Blackboard and

Moodle, but through a variety of common social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,

etc.) carefully usurped by faculty specifically for their students educational benefits. Of course,

utilizing social media platforms as educational tools can be a daunting task. There are delicate

balances that must be struck and potential pitfalls to be negotiated, but the myriad benefits of

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Writing together: Using social media to teach composition in college

incorporating social media into composition pedagogy can certainly outweigh the risks, and it is

important to understand why incorporating social media is becoming increasingly necessary.

Developing a plan of action that will bridge the divide between face-to-face classroom-based

interaction and the digital spaces students are familiar and comfortable with also necessitates

knowing what has previously been done with social media in education and what is currently

being done well. The following literature review seeks to do all of that in terms of campus based

face-to-face courses.

Institutionalizing Participatory Culture

There are entire generations of mankind that now exist in a hypertext reality born of the digital

experiences that have shaped the bulk of their lives, and significantly impacted their social roles

and identities. As such, students today are entrenched in participatory cultures which demand

high levels of social interaction in digital communities. These students see the world from a

social perspective . . . that does not discriminate between purely social activity for entertainment

purposes and social activity for learning (Scott, 2012; 55). As integral members of variously

defined user groups that employ rhetorical value as socio-cultural capital (Kimmons, 2014),

these participants feel more connected because they believe their personal contributions

genuinely matter to other members (Bartow, 2014), and students who have been raised in

participatory cultures dont leave these deeply engrained ideals of social interaction behind when

they enter a physical classroom environment. Because of these connectivity needs, students who

are offered the ability to use various forms of social media as part of the learning experience

generally report feelings of greater success in courses that afforded such opportunities (Cao,

Ajjan & Hong, 2013).

Unfortunately, while the rules of participatory culture allow for an academic depth of

discourse that would help students blossom in a variety of disciplines, the demands of that

culture rarely require academic depth in discussion, so the potential for academic discourse tends

to remain exactly that, potential. Too often, the barrage of requirements districts place on public

K-12 educators leaves little time for teachers to help students whose common spaces straddle the

line between physical and digital worlds to adapt the generally self-taught, self-guided logistics

of social media from the purely social space they already know to the academic knowledge

building environment they are being introduced to (Hrastinski & Aghaee, 2012). Thus the

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public, as represented by school boards, may be able to dictate that students should be taught

to use such technology with educational intent in school, while remaining virtually blind to the

constraints that make facilitating technology use in education programs so impossible (Bartow,

2014). The resulting lack of sufficient technology instruction during those formative K-12 years

means that college and/or university level instructors are left with only two options, either forgo

the potential benefits of social media use for collaboration and discourse, or dedicate both time

and resources early in a semester to teaching students how to transition from using social media

for developing socio-cultural capital to using it to build intellectual and cultural capitals.

Educational Concerns of Identity and Community in Social Media

Most students tend to be familiar with various forms of social mediablogs, Twitter, Facebook,

Tumbler, Pinterest, discussion boards, comments sections of webpages, etc.but familiarity and

usability relies on rules based in concepts of social decorum and degrees of anonymity specific

to the platform used that dont often lend themselves constructively to educational spaces. For

instance, research shows that students most frequently use Twitter in and out of educational

environments as a means of information sharing rather than as a conversational or collaborative

space (Lin, Hoffman & Borengasser, 2013), so understanding the limitations posed by the

conventions of Twitter as a platform can inform teachers of the reduced usability of Twitter for

creating a conversationally communicative space.

As a more traditionally communicative space, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and

Snapchat may feature prominently in discourse preferences among students for social contact,

yet there are limitations attached to these platforms as well. Many students are reluctant to

mention Snapchat in front of faculty for the same reason that they admit to avoiding Facebook:

they are uncomfortable with the facultys presence there and fear they are losing their social

refuge by allowing teachers to connect with them in that space (Mendez, Le & Cruz, 2014).

For those reluctant students, these platforms represent longstanding communities in which they

have each diligently constructed elaborate identities that dont necessarily coincide with the

identity each student is trying to cultivate in academia (Kimmons, 2014).

Of course, privacy is a key concern for many students, though few universities have

publicly published policies regarding student privacy concerns, focusing instead on their own

institutional intellectual property and marketing issues (Nathan, MacGougan & Shaffer, 2014).

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This apparent lack of policy may be influenced by the reality that students privacy concerns are

often based on various misinterpretations of terminology, and many students tend to conflate

privacy with forced or accidental exposure of particular identities to unintended others. Students

may then claim privacy violations when they feel that exposure of one constructed identity may

have negatively influenced their relationship with said unintended other (Mendez, Le & Cruz,

2014). Identities are predominately social constructions, and students fear that revealing too

much of their personal lives to teachers or even exposing a different self to their friends and

contacts within a specific digital community can lead to long-term negative effects (Mendez, Le

& Cruz, 2014). Tell a student, you can always just create a new account, separate from your

personal account, and he or she may very well respond with, oh, I am. I dont want my friends

to see me talk that way, when the that way referred to is defined by common academic

conventions rather than their usual social ones.

There is also a fear that friending, liking, or following an instructor on various

social media platforms will expose the student to more about his or her teacher than the student

ever wanted to know. As psycho-sociologist Simon Clarke argues in Culture and Identity

(2011), the way in which people imagine the world to be and imagine the ways that others exist

in the world is central to the construction of identity (p.511), and both students and teachers

may have their understandings of each other in their prescribed roles of teacher and student

challenged by the different masks they wear during encounters in various social environments.

Of course, no users identity is ever an authentic identity, and, be it an instructors or a

students in physical or digital spaces, it is always constructed to fit within the parameters of a

particular social or discourse community. The very fact that identity and questions of

authenticity are tricky for both students and teachers to negotiate opens myriad possibilities

for new levels of discourse in the classroom about ideas of authenticity, community, culture,

and the social construct that is self (Kimmons, 2014).

Critical Engagement through Social Media

In situations where the author in both physical and digital spaces is a classmate or instructor that

they will have to interact with regularly, the student is more likely to offer feedback as a means

of emotional or contextual support, rather than as the act of critical engagement that teachers

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would like to see (Deng & Yuen, 2011). Students must be taught how to use commentary for

more than commiseration and corroboration, and pedagogy plays a pivotal role in this regard

(Hrastinski & Aghaee, 2012). This is especially true for teachers who incorporate blog and blog-

like platforms, such as Wordpress, Tumbler, and Weebly, as part of their course requirements.

According to Hariot-Watt University instructor Judy Robertson in an article published in

2011, To be successful university learners, students need to develop skills in self-directed

learning (p.1628). Blogs are one of the most potentially valuable social media platforms

available to both students and teachers for first year composition courses and beyond because of

their semi-unique ability to promote self-directed learning through both authorship and blog-

reading experiences (Deng & Yuen, 2011). As part of the blog-reading experience, and to

provide a framework for students to begin learning how to blog effectively in first year

composition, it has proven useful for students to spend some time examining the blogs of popular

authors to discover what meta-reflection, thinking and writing about writing, actually looks like

(Johnson, 2010). As part of the authorship experience, Kathryn Crowther in the article Blogging

as process in the composition classroom contends that blogs can create a particularly dynamic

space for writing. Not only does a blog feel personal . . . it also opens up for interactive writing

via the comments and through external linking. It is an excellent way to have students think

about audience when they know that other people, possibly even outside of our class, will be

reading their posts (2011). Likewise, Charles Tryon, in Writing and citizenship: Using blogs to

teach first-year composition, suggests that using blogs can convey the connections between the

classroom and the so-called real world, which seems to exist everywhere else (2006; 128).

These real world connections can greatly enhance students perception of the value of writing

while also yielding opportunities to discuss the increasingly important concept of Kairos.

Collaboration through Social Media

Students can also benefit from incorporation of social media platforms in course work because of

the possibilities they present for greater collaboration. Students who use the popular collection

based platform of Pinterest typically use it to collect stories, images and ideas from all over the

web, but may never really consider the possibility of using Pinterest as a method of collecting

research and data or collaborating with classmates on projects (Gardner, 2014). Using Pinterest

for research and collaboration is something which must be modeled for students first. Other

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platforms also recommended for collaboration include Diigo, VoiceThread, thinglink, and

Popcorn Maker, which also allow users to gather, share, and comment on resources for group or

individual projects and can enable deep interactive engagement with an assigned text (Griffin,

& Minter, 2013).

In a study that compared Facebook to more traditional institutionally based Content

Management Systems like Blackboard and Moodle, the researchers found that Facebook far

outstripped the capabilities of the CMSs in terms of both usability and collaborative qualities,

noting also that Facebooks only downfall was in offering students graded assessment due to

FERPA regulations (Loving & Ochoa, 2011). Facebook as an extension of the classroom also

allows students better access to instructor assistance in a form that is often less rigid than email

correspondence and are, therefore, more conducive to negotiation of confusing concepts,

development of emerging ideas, and proliferation of articles, videos, and other relevant content

as it is newly discovered by all course members (Schwartz, (2010). It should be understood by

both instructors and students that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc., are only part of

the overall learning experience, and work done in digital spaces will always need to be connected

to the face-to-face classroom (Wang, Scown, Urquhart & Hardman, 2012).

Conclusion

The digital world and physical world are steadily merging in ways previously unimaginable as

digital technology changes the way we all live and interact, and is it unfortunate that current

scholarly research does not focus more heavily on best practices in pedagogy that incorporates

social media. If teachers wish to give their students the best possible chance of success in future

endeavors, they must help students to understand how both the digital and physical are

connected. Incorporating the social media platforms students use to collaborate and communicate

with in their personal lives has become a necessary part of establishing that connection. Though

continuing research will always be needed due to the ever evolving and expanding nature of

social media and the digital spaces they occupy, time must be dedicated to teaching students to

use established and emerging platforms in ways that enhance their educational experiences, and

teachers will need to have a firm grasp of what platforms and technologies will work best based

on desired learning outcomes. Research shows that social media platforms like Facebook,

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Twitter, Wordpress, Tumbler, and Pinterest all have a place in education. The trick is teaching

students new ways of thinking about and working in these digital communities.

Works Cited

Bartow, S. M. (2014, February 10). Teaching with social media: Disrupting present day public

education. Educational Studies, 50(1), 36-64.

Cao, Y., Ajjan, H. and Hong, P. (2013), Using social media applications for educational

outcomes in college teaching: A structural equation analysis. British Journal of

Educational Technology, 44: 581593. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12066

Clarke, Simon. Culture and identity. The Sage handbook of cultural analysis, 510-529.

http://www.sage-ereference.com/view/hdbk_culturanalysis/n24.xml

Crowther, K. (2011, September 17). Blogging as Process in the Composition Classroom.

Retrieved November 19, 2014, from http://techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu/blogging-as-process-

in-the-composition-classroom/

Deng, L., & Yuen, A. Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs. Computers

and Education, 56(2), 441-451. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.005

Gardner, T., & Jill (2014, September 30). Ten Pinterest assignments. In Bedford Bits: Ideas for

teaching composition. Retrieved November 18, 2014.

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Abigail Morris ENGL 7701 Project 4 Final