Implementing social networking
Yes, educators can’t afford to ignore Web 2.0 anymore. I believe this. I would dearly love to integrate Web 2.0 into my lessons – social networking in particular. But when it comes to actual implementation, I’m stumped.
Why is this the case? I consider myself relatively IT-savvy, and I have been officially trained as a teacher, so it would seem that this shouldn’t be a problem I am facing. Using social networking for education, however, is not a particularly intuitive exercise. If we look at the more popular services like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, we can see that they weren’t really built with the classroom in mind. From observation and experience, the average student seems to use Facebook primarily to share photos, comment about their life, and to play online games – homework isn’t quite in the equation.
I suppose social networking is still useful as an extended form of interaction with/among students, but I would really love to throw some learning into the mix as well. I’m currently looking at using Facebook groups and pages, and am toying with the idea of using Ning, but overall I’m still rather unsure of how to get students interested and involved in such exercises, other than simply making it mandatory to do so (which, at the same time, usually decreases their interest levels somewhat).
Any ideas?
Posted on March 14, 2010, in Education, Technology. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
Got here after reading a retweet from Tuck Soon.
I am glad that you are thinking of meaningfully bringing in Web 2.0 into education. You are also right that ideas are one thing and implementation is another. I have two suggestions.
Some of my teacher trainees have thought about how to integrate Facebook into lessons. You are welcome to visit my ICT course wiki (http://ict-course.pbworks.com/) and do a search for “Facebook”.
You might also ask your students for ideas on what they might do educationally with Facebook. The idea here is to get them where they are already at and bridge those behaviours and needs to curricular needs. The idea is also to find some middle ground, not swing wildly to either side.
For example, there is value is socializing, e.g., they might discuss with one another a homework problem just like they might discuss a BGR problem on a FB wall. But swinging immediately to one end, e.g., forming a group to discuss a problem might be too much like a discussion forum in the school’s LMS. If an LMS exists, why replicate it in FB?