The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on October 27, 2008

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Underage drinking. Risqué behavior. By now most of us have heard of or even seen for ourselves inappropriate content posted to Facebook and MySpace, those online social networking sites favored by so many of today’s youth. Indeed, such excesses function as cautionary tales for our students, warning them of the academic, personal and economic consequences of such public revelations. But should we banish online social networks from the academy? The fact that Middlebury College and Inside Higher Ed have chosen to create Facebook profiles would seem to indicate their recognition of the unique communicative power of this new networking medium.

A 2004 post by Lee Lefever as well as the video below by Lee and Sachi Lefever provide a clear and concise overview of Facebook-like social networking and how it differs from other forms of communication, such as threaded discussion lists that are common to many university course management systems (e.g., Blackboard, eCollege, WebCT Vista).

An example of the ability of this new medium to inform, empower and educate is the role Facebook played in mobilizing 80,000 Egyptians to support an April 6, 2008 strike and protest. In this instance, Facebook supplied the necessary communication conduit for citizen activists in a country where traditional media is state controlled and where it is illegal for groups of more than five people to gather at one place without prior registration and permission. Through Facebook their cause was picked up and spread by other activist communities in the online social network community such as Harvard’s Internet and Democracy Project, the Leadership Council for Human Rights, Digiactive: A World of Digital Activists and Journeyman Pictures, thus reaching a global audience.

Two online communities I have used successfully for my own teaching and learning are Ning and LiveMocha. Ning describes itself as a platform “where you can create your own social network for anything”. In very short order and using an intuitive interface, instructors can create a rich, robust, collaborative environment where students can customize their personal pages, share pictures, videos, audio and text, communicate through group forums, blogs and private messages, and update and keep track of events and assignments through a shared group calendar. As an administrator, you control the features to which your members have access. You can make your Ning public, opening up the possibility of international participation, or private, such as a Ning I recently created for teachers of Chinese. I’ve found the following two networks particularly helpful for my own professional development: Ning in Education, which boasts almost 2,000 members and its companion site, Classroom 2.0 which currently lists over 9,000 members! I’ve turned to LiveMocha as a way to motivate me to learn Chinese. LiveMocha utilizes a combination of online interactive language lessons and tests with the ability to practice your burgeoning skills with native speakers in a multi-modal tandem language learning exchange. You can send your community of native speakers your written and oral work for feedback, and interact with them via text and audio chat tools. Each language has a tutor or guide to assist you and each week you are sent progress reports on your work. Both of these sites, as with many web 2.0 sites, are free. In using these networks, I, my colleagues and students are able to participate in situated learning environments that allow all learners to engage in meaningful, purposeful exchanges in authentic communities of practice.

If one of our goals as language educators is to provide a context-rich environment where students are, as John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler describe, “learning to be”, by acquiring the habits and norms of a community of practice, then surely we could do worse than to make use of online social networks that capitalize on the role that interaction, collaboration and discourse plays in constructing that knowledge. Most importantly, these environments become the arena in which students can inform, empower and educate themselves and others–including their teachers. And isn’t this what we strive for, especially as we seek to improve learning among our NetGen and Neomillenial students and increase their engagement and motivation? What are your thoughts? Do you have experiences to share?

Categories: social networks
Tags: Barbara, CMS, facebook, Inside Higher Ed, Lefever, LiveMocha, Middlebury, myspace, netgen, Ning, social networks, students