Social Networking and Education

There are a multitude of social network sites available to the adult learner, but many of them are not suitable for use in the classroom (at least not in the "normal" sense or without a lot of altering). Some of the most popular social networking sites available today are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, Google+, MySpace, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Tagged, Vine, VK, Academia.edu, etc. Out of this list, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most commonly used social networking sites for adult learners and professionals. Twiducate is also a social networking site and was created for educators to use as a controlled alternative to Facebook and Twitter.

Twiducate contains links to Wikipedia, BBC, Discovery Education, SchoolTube, Scribd, Prezi, and many more. You can add teachers and students to your "group," as well as inputting important dates, links, emails, and announcements. There is a "Share your thoughts" area, where you can post things much like the news feed on Facebook and other similar social networking sites. Some other interesting features are class bookmarks and the ability to keep track of others in the class network. 

Most students will be familiar with the way this site functions since it is like a cross between Facebook and most college Blackboards. The one main difference is that Twiducate does not allow students to interact with or see posts by others not in their network. This helps to keep the learner on task (we all know how distracting Facebook can be) and safe from harassment or outside influences. The teacher, who acts like a group administrator, has the option to forbid students from editing or deleting their own posts (good for preventing "fly-by" posts, where a student posts something inappropriate and then deletes or edits it before the teacher sees it). There are also settings to allow the teacher to receive email notifications whenever a student posts something and the chat feature can be also disabled (good for preventing overly social activities during classroom sessions or quizzes/tests). Disabling chat also prevents students from interacting with each other in a manner that is outside of the teacher's sight and control.

As a professional alternative to Facebook, LinkedIn is one of the most used social networking sites out there. This site is a lot like a digital CV (curriculum vitae) that places users educational and career related information in the eye of a controlled public. Subscribers input their data and experience in the hopes that it will be seen by job/career recruiters (helping them find employment) or they use it to connect with others in their same career field (Lemann, 2015). LinkedIn is available in more than 200 countries and territories, as well as over 24 languages (Hempel, 2013). As an employment-related social networking site, LinkedIn is one of the most active ones available, with almost 450 million users worldwide (Awan, 2015).

When used as a social network for educational purposes, LinkedIn supports the formation of interest groups by its users (which can be private or "public"). While many of the groups are employment and career related, there are a hundreds of thousands of groups available that cover academic and career issues. Additionally, these groups have moderated discussion areas (albeit basic and limited). Unfortunately, many of these group areas are found to contain an excessive amount of spam, although efforts have been made to reduce this problem. Groups use emails and notifications to help keep their members informed of updates, discussions, and posts, as well as access to polls.

Educators can create groups for their students to use during collaborative projects and learners can join groups that contain other users who are working (or have worked) on similar projects. A couple of "outside the box" LinkedIn uses for educators are--as a means for teachers to keep their students informed about events and situations, a way to search for funding or people for projects and events, and connect or collaborate with other educators for support, ideas, and research. Students can use LinkedIn to access college portals to find scholarships, internships, and graduate positions; search for mentors and tutors; join research groups; and collaborate with other students on group projects.

With a little research a teacher can often find “sister” sites to many of the most common social networks that are dedicated solely to education. Twitter is one of the most used social networks for this purpose, with numerous web pages available to teachers explaining this use. Some of these web sites are:

Twitter for Education

The Teacher's Guide toTwitter

Twitter4TeachersWiki

Twitter forTeachers

For the “modern” educator there are a multitude of resources available to them for use with their students and social networking sites are an excellent example of how to merge student-familiar technology with education to the benefit of all concerned.

References

Awan, Aatif. (2015, October 29). How LinkedIn’s 400 million 

       members are helping build the economic graph. LinkedIn 

       Official Blog. Retrieved from 

       http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/10/29/400-million-members/

Hempel, Jessi (2013, July 1). LinkedIn: How It's Changing 

       Business. Fortune, 69–74.

Lemann, Nicholas. (2015, October 12). The network man: Reid 

       Hoffman’s big idea. The New Yorker. Retrieved from 

       http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-network-

       man