Social Media in the Classroom

Searching for results on Google about social media in the classroom, I found a Youtube video about prof. Michael Wesch explaining his use of netwibes for educational purposes.
Being already impressed by prof. Wesch work after seeing his youtube video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” I thought it would be interesting to see how he combines new media and a very old science – ethnography.
The netvibes page was interesting to browse about and I was lucky to incidentally find a student blog by stevcoop sharing thoughts on education and posting a video about it.
Here is just a quick insight:

But honestly my thoughts about education and its methods, its format, its non/effectiveness, its future have exploded since I started the class. With the help of Dr. Wesch and all my fellow Diggies, I’ve been introduced to whole new ways of thinking about education, and I’ve been challenged (sometimes painfully so) in a lot of different ways. I’d always considered myself a bit of a traditionalist (whatever that means) when it came to education. I preferred (and in some cases still do prefer) the smell and feel of books, using notecards to organize research, listening to old-style lectures--the ones where a professor just stands and talks to you as one who knows so much about the material and is excited about it and talks about it almost as if it were a legend passed down over generations. And I used to prefer it almost begrudgingly over the "newer" kind of methods, with professors using PowerPoints and interactive Clicker quizzes/sessions and all these various kinds of online/computer assignments But I had never really asked myself why that was the case. At some base level it almost felt like the new digital technologies were edging-out the older forms, and sometimes I’d get a bit defensive about it. But over the last year, and especially over the last semester, I’ve realized that it’s not like that or about that at all. Books and notecards are, like computers and blogging and video-editing, just a form of technology. And yes they’re different and do different things—that’s a given. But the real issue at hand isn’t the technology, but rather the learning process. It’s more important to focus on trying to encourage the inquiry process and to help students get to the levels of procedural and constructed knowledge. It's more important to get students excited about and engaged in the material, to the point that they're even talking about it outside of class (without having that being forced upon them by homework or stress/fear over not doing well on the test). That’s really what needs to be reformed, far more than the infrastructure.

I find this post expresses it excellently – the changes or better the not-changes in education processes. Obviously the technologies in learning environments have changed significantly – compared to the education of my parents, when the most advanced technology was an overhead projector (and computers were the size of rooms) to my early student years with power point to advances in the class “New Media & Society” (exploring everything yet unknown to a new media illiterate).

The point stevcoop also highlights is: getting students excited about and engaged in the material. However, this can not be achieved only with new/newer technology as I learned from my own experience – students themselves should achieve at least the desire to want to learn. I regret all the wasted hours not paying enough attention or skipping class, because it was “boring”. Obviously it really was boring, but it was boring, because I didn’t know what to do with that particular knowledge back then – with the experience I have now (and having had to learn stuff twice instead of properly listening once) I learned to value all the “boring” classes. Even though back then (nearly nine years ago, since I started university) I never believed to say this, but for sure it is true: “There’s method in (t)his madness.“

Prof. Wesch posted another video on You Tube “A Vision of Students Today” – it deals with students and expresses the everyday dilemma of modern education – from participation in class to the relevance of the studies. The video is based on wiki document, edited by 200 students, who basically surveyed themselves.

Apparently, we can’t afford to ignore new technologies and new media, among others also social media, so we should learn to use them to our benefit. With the right knowledge on how to handle them, we can easily change the “entertaining” side of them into a “motivating” function, without the fear that the strict education is becoming “edutainment”.