Education is no more restricted to institutions. We learn in multiple ways, either from traditional settings at school, group discussions on Facebook, or How-To's videos on YouTube. Thus, why not mix both and take advantage of the affordances of Web 2.0?
That sounds like a natural evolution in the educational landscape, and many teachers have already implemented social learning activities (SMLA) successfully in their teaching strategies. Some of our readings this week and other studies published in the literature showcase the benefits of SMLA to developing, practicing, and mastering higher-order thinking skills, as well as engaging students in collaborating works and supporting them in learning in formal and informal ways.
That being said, the successful implementation of SLMA in instructional strategies needs to be anticipated and thoughtfully prepared. As mentioned by Gülbahar et al. (2017), some common barriers regarding technology integration refer to issues internal and external to the teacher like training, support, confidence, and beliefs about how students learn.
Though social media's affordances and teachers' level of preparedness are both critical, one point that was not really addressed in the provided resources was the learner/student's perspective. Though most findings seem to converge to positive feedback about SMLA, some important considerations must be addressed prior to implementing social media into instruction: what arguments have been identified to engage students in SMLA? What skills are required to succeed in SMLA?
In addition to the SCOPE framework mentioned by Dr. Dennen in her manuscript, these are important questions to address when designing SMLA. As reminded by Dr. Dennen, most people rely on the ADDIE model to design useful instruction. Thus, I was wondering how to concretely conduct a learner analysis in this specific situation. In my reflection, I draw a connection with the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) used "to assess college students’ motivational orientations and their use of different learning strategies for a college course" (Driscoll and Burner 2022). I found some questionnaires online that have been used to collect students' feedback on SMLA (see below), but I could not find any that analyzed students' levels of preparedness to use social media in a higher ed curriculum.
I might have missed resources about it though, or maybe some are currently under construction. But since projects incorporating SMLA are more and more frequent in my activities, whether in instructional or professional settings, I am deeply concerned about profiling learners prior to the design development and implementation of SMLA in future learning and training projects.
For now, I considered the following aspects to conduct a learner analysis in an SMLA approach:
- establish a questionnaire based on previous feedback from students and teachers regarding SMLA
- submit the questionnaire to the target audience during the analysis step
- add questions to assess the produsage-related skills of the audience as described by Bruns
- select the most appropriate tool(s) to support SMLA based on (1) students' expectations and their "social media savviness", (2) the compatibility of the affordances of the tool(s) in regard to the activities planned for the course; the choice must be made in agreement and with the target audience
- identify concerns and suggestions of students regarding data privacy, norms, and rules in digital social environments.
What about you? How would conduct learners' analysis to design and develop SMLA?
References:Bruns, A. (2011).
Beyond difference: Reconfiguring education for the user-led ageLinks to an external site.. In R. Land & S. Bayne (Eds.), Digital Difference (pp. 131-144). Brill Sense.
Driscoll, M. P., & Burner, K. (2021). Psychology of Learning For Instruction (4th ed.). Pearson Education (US). https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/books/9780136896647
I guess it may be easier to target the newer generation to adopt social media learning activities (afterall they are more tech-savvy and more active in these platforms). Conducting learner’s analysis also help to determine which social media platforms they ‘prefer’ and have existing knowledge in using those platforms. This will definitely reduce the need to ‘reteach’ them the skills and we can select the appropriate social media tools from there. Through learner’s analysis, it’d help us understand better the characteristics, preference or our target learners, and thereby enabling us to design SMLA that aligns with their expectation and the learning objectives.
ReplyDeleteYoung here btw. Sorry i couldn’t login my account for some reason. ):
DeleteThank you for the thorough post! I think I will revisit it for future reference. In terms of "students's levels of preparedness" I once had a similar question. As teaching an undergraduate course for several years, where we integrate multiple social media tools (e.g., Twitter, Pinterest), I observed that quite a lot of students struggled with some technical features of the integrated tools although they were from younger generation who could be considered "digital natives." They needed tutorials, either in a short video or in a job aid format, to learn about specific features of the tools. So in terns of learner analysis on their preparedness, I thought we might need to also add questions about their prior knowledge and skills with specific technology tools that will be integrated in the course, in addition to questions about their general attitudes toward social media integration. For instance, if we're planning on using Twitter in class, we can ask "do you know how to use Retweet feature on Twitter?" and based on the results, we can prepare a tutorial accordingly.
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