Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

4.5. Social Media

Social media are really a sub-category of computer technology, but their development deserves a section of its own in the history of educational technology. Social media cover a wide range of different technologies, including blogs, wikis, YouTube videos, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, Twitter, Skype and Facebook. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010) define social media as:

A group of Internet-based applications that …allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content, based on interactions among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.

Social media are strongly associated with young people and ‘millenials’ – in other words, many of the students in post-secondary education. At the time of writing social media are only just being integrated into formal education and to date their main educational value has been in non-formal education, such as fostering online communities of practice, or around the edges of classroom teaching, such as ‘tweets’ during lectures or ratings of instructors. It will be argued though and they have much greater potential for learning.