Thank you

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This is it! Tonight is my last official post for EME6414, Summer 2023. What to write about? If you had asked me a few hours earlier, my honest answer would have been "no idea". It's not I don't have anything on my mind (I may have too much actually), but I was not sure how to approach this last post. So, I've decided I'll do just as usual and draw a few personal reflections. To help me tackle this last challenge, I went back to Canvas and get an overview of our Modules Main Page. Gosh, what a journey it has been! The first image that comes to my mind is the iceberg metaphor. You know, this impression that for years, you had been exploring the World Wide Web with confidence, as if you were in your own neighborhood, with your own habits, hanging out with the same people, getting what you were looking for, not less, not more. And one day, you realize that you were just scratching the surface and that a whole world was lying underneath, inviting you to a whole new...
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Usefulness of Social Media in Project-Based Learning

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I wanted to elaborate a bit more about the use of social media in the classroom and for learning purposes in general.

In the discussion board, I've already mentioned this comprehensive resource about the Ethical Implications of teachers Who Use Social Networking Sites (SNSs) to communicate. This led me to reflect on the usefulness of social media for teaching and learning purposes, and the concerns related to their implementation in instructional strategies. I will focus on the higher ed context as it's my current work setting.

Several studies, blogs, and discussions reported the use of social media to facilitate communication within the class, enhance students' engagement, organize group work, and trigger learners' creativity. I wanted to take a different perspective and reflect on how social media can contribute to the development and mastering of skills that appear to be critical and even strategic for many professionals.

One faculty I am frequently working with is creating a new learning program for students in their last year of engineering studies. She plans to organize her course into a project-based learning experience, where students will work as a group and simulate a work-based project that involves internal and external communication with various stakeholders, including fictional co-workers, clients, and the global population. For that project, one important part would be to manage the social media presence of the fictional group.

I love that idea. To me, integrating social media in simulation-based learning is relevant in several ways. Companies now pervade Web 2.0 to promote their brand and values (remember Kietzmann et al.'s article from week 1?), retain customers and reach new ones, and also expand their activities thanks to crowdsourcing. Consequently, newcomers in the job market should be aware of the usefulness of such tools and should learn the skills required to use them efficiently and in a responsible and ethical manner.

For instance, students could be asked to identify the reasons they would use Web 2.0 in their project, and then determine the best platform(s)/tool to achieve their goals (social media account, blog, wiki, both?). Then, they could reflect on the language to use to communicate their content and interact with people online, the frequency and settings of their interactions (do they want people to like, comment, or reshare their posts?). Importantly, they would also have to reflect on other concerns like confidentiality, authorship, and ownership of ideas they could collect through crowdsourcing.

What I like about such a project is that it mimics what people should think about when using social media for professional purposes, which would most likely be what most of those students will encounter in their professional lives, whether as producers or consumers of content.

What about you? According to you, which skills could be developed and mastered with the help of social media? How would you do to integrate them into your teaching/training strategies?

Resources:

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social mediaLinks to an external site.Links to an external site.. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241-251. doi: 10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005

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