Article # 1 - Teaching, Learning, and Sharing: How
Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media
Morna, Seamna, Hester (2011) report that 80% of faculty in
North America use social media in courses. Facebook and Youtube are the most
highly used forms of social media for personal use amongst faculty. Over 40% of
faculty has incorporated social media into assignments, and 20% have asked
students to comment or post to social media sites. Video is the most popular
form of media used in class. Faculty is concerned about integrity and privacy
issues when students use social media but overall instructors are positive
about the shift toward social media stating that: “video, podcasts and wikis
are valuable tools for teaching” (Morna, Seamna, Hester, 2011, Pg. 3).
Article #2 - How Social Media Can and Should Impact
Higher Education
Blankenship (2010) cites work by Howard Rheingold suggesting
that social media provides distinct benefits to students including; “greater
student engagement, greater student interest, students taking more control of
their education and more responsibility for their education”. Additionally
Rheingold maintains that social media inspires creativity in teaching. He uses
the example of Jeremy Fiebig at University of North Carolina who used the video
game Second Life to simulate attending a play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
The students also perform plays using the software, and they are encouraged to
discuss course material online.
Web 2.0 example
A web 2.0 tool that is very useful in education is
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia with over 23 million
articles. It is free and edited collaboratively by any user and there are over
100,000 active contributors. Over 365 million people use the site globally. The
accuracy of the information has been questioned, but a review in 2005 by
Nature, determined that the accuracy rate was similar to Encyclopedia
Britannica in terms of ‘serious errors’. Britannica disagreed with the findings.
References
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