Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

7. Social Media

7.1. What are Social Media?

Around 2005, a new range of web tools began to find their way into general use, and increasingly into educational use. These can be loosely described as social media, as they reflect a different culture of web use from the former ‘center-to-periphery’ push of institutional web sites.

Here are some of the tools and their uses (there are many more possible examples: click on each example for an educational application):

Type of Tool	Example	Application
Blogs	Stephen’s Web Online Learning and Distance Education Resources	Allows an individual to make regular postings to the web, e.g. a personal diary or an analysis of current events
Wikis	Wikipedia UBC’s Math Exam Resources	An “open” collective publication, allowing people to contribute or create a body of information
Social networking	FaceBook LinkedIn	A social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and interact with them
Multi-media archives	Podcasts You-Tube Flikr e-portfolios MIT Open Course-Ware	Allows end-users to access, store, download and share audio recordings, photographs, and video
Multi-player games	RainbowSix Siege Dragonfly Propulsive Problematics	Enables players to compete or collaborate against each other or a third party/parties represented by the computer, usually in real-time
Mobile learning	Mobile phones and apps, e.g. Soil TopARgraphy	Enables users to access multiple information formats (voice, text, video, etc.) at any time, any place

The main feature of social media is that they empower the end-user to access, create, disseminate, and share information easily in a user-friendly, open environment. Usually, the only direct cost is the time of the end-user. There are often few controls over content, other than those normally imposed by a state or government (such as libel or pornography). One feature of such tools is to empower the end-user – the learner or customer – to self-access and manage data (such as online banking) and to form personal networks (for example through FaceBook). For these reasons, some have called social media the ‘democratization’ of the web, although at the same time one could argue that social media are now heavily commercialized through advertising.

In general, social media tools are based on very simple software, in that, they have relatively few lines of code. As a result, new tools and applications (‘apps’) are constantly emerging, and their use is either free or very low cost. For a good broad overview of the use of social media in education, see Lee and McCoughlin (2011).