Social Media Research

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Research on Social Media in Education

@joe_edtech

This blog post is essentially a summary of an article titled "Social Networking: Boundaries and Limits Part 1: Ethics" which appeared in the March/April 2014 edition of Tech Trends, an AECT publication. The APA citation is below.

Some of my recent blog posts have focused on getting the most out of social media tools for professional development, and making meaning out of noise by curating stories from social media. But, occasionally I like to share some of the research in the field.  Last Spring's edition Tech Trends magazine included an article that started by summarizing some of the statistics about how many of our students are using social media on a regular basis and for what reasons. I had to share...

• According to studies from 2010 and later, 74% of kids 13-18 have at least one account on a social networking site, and most have more than one. (I'd like to point out that most of this research was completed before the explosion of the use of Twitter by young people.)
• Students don't just use social media for communication, they use it for news and research. One study cited by the authors suggests that as many as 68% of high school students use social networking to research colleges and universities.
• The prevalence of social media amongst college students has caused professors to change instruction. According to a 2011 study cited by the authors, up to "91% of college faculty reported using social networking for professional and/or educational purposes. According to the faculty responses, 70% viewed utilizing social networking as a valuable tool for teaching in the classroom."
• In that same study, 58% of college professors suggested that social networking is an important way to support collaborative learning.

It is logical to conclude that these percentages have increased sharply since the research was completed in 2010 and 2011. And that leads us to another couple of conclusions. First, it is important for us to spend time in K-12 teaching students appropriate social networking skills because they will likely need those skills when they are in college. Secondly, by the time they get to high school, a majority of our students are already using social media. If we don't spend time teaching them social networking skills and digital citizenship ethics, we've given them the Internet with no safety net.

The article covers several other items that are worth discussing, but one that I can't pass up has to do with "Social Role Theory." The authors say, "A faculty member is placed in a potentially problematic ethical position when he/she takes on the dual role of teacher and friend to a student when utilizing social networking" (26). In other words, in K-12, it is important to provide our teachers with ongoing professional development in effective and appropriate ways of using social media with our students, and for each school district to provide clear guidelines and policies for teachers and administrators to follow. 

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Aragon, A., AlDoubi, S., Kaminski, K., Anderson, S., Isaacs, N. (2014) Social networking: Boundaries and limits part 1: Ethics. Tech Trends 58(2), 25-31.