Hi there everybody. My name is Michelle Pacansky-Brock, I'll be your facilitator for the next four
weeks and I just want to take a few moments to welcome you to Building Online Community
with Social Media. This is a topic that I am extremely passionate about and I believe
is very important to us all as educators. The topics that we'll cover in this class
may be brand new to some of you and may be old hat to others. And that's important and,
actually, very valuable to ensuring that we all have a very rich experience learning together
in this community that we are fostering and beginning to build at this very moment. So
I have some slides put together that I just want to jump into real quick in this introduciton.
A lot of this information will be repeated over the next four weeks so we'll be building
upon what it means to learn in community and how we can be leveraging many of the popular
types of social media tools that are out there today and are quickly becoming part of our
mainstream society.
If you haven't noticed already, we do have a Twitter hashtag established for this class.
A hashtag is a tag that you can add to any tweet in Twitter and you will all get up and
running on that soon and you see that on our screen here, #BOCSM.
Let's just touch briefly about some information about our 18-24 year old student population
which you'll delve into more thoroughly this week in week one. This student group actually
does not remember life before the internet which can be a pretty amazing idea, to ponder
for a moment as we think about all the changes that we have gone through. This society that
exists around us -- this global, rich, internet driven society -- is not a new thing to most
of our students today. They socialize face-to-face and online. 95% of them use a social network
and 70% of them do so daily. So we've really reached the saturation point of social networking.
And roughly 60% of California community college distance education students are within this
age group.
Our younger students also are very comfortable or more comfortable than our older students
we could say, creating and sharing content online. 45% of them share videos online, on
video share sites like YouTube; 42% of them contribute to wikis, and a growing number
of them 37% and 35% use blogs and use podcasts. Our students are used to immediate access
to information but also information that is accessed and shared in a participatory manner
and so, really, what we're talking about here is a shift in how socialization is occurring
and also in how learning is occurring. And this is important for us to be thinking about
as educators. 86% of these students have a cell phone and 51% have a hand held internet
device.
We have shifted from an internet society that was a first-generation internet society to
a web 2.0 society and what that means is that content and information online is no longer
just accessed by a user. Now when a user enters the internet environment, he or she is provided
with opportunities to participate, leave one's opinions, comment and also leverage those
thoughts and ideas that others have contributed. We are now in a society that is very much
comprised of a collective intelligence and as educators sometimes we think about that
as a bad thing because we think that information should always be validated first and that's
not the way it is anymore. It may be helpful to think about the content that we find on
the internet, more like a dialogue or a conversation. So, if you walk up to a group of people, of
course you are not going to automatically assume that everyone's thoughts are valid
but you may sit there and reflect and need to sort through and make decisions for yourself
about who has valid points and what you want to pursue further. And those are some important
skills we need to be fostering in our students and some of the outcomes that can be reached
if we begin to build participatory learning environments with social media.
Twitter itself, which may be something that each of you use and it may be something you've
heard of but you've never had any interest in getting to know. Well, Twitter is now mainstream.
And the statistics are staggering -- and these are actually a little old, actually -- 40,000
Tweets per minute which equals over 57,000,000 tweets a day. So how can that interest, that
type of interaction and sharing of brief little snippets of information be leveraged in learning?
Or how can we start using Twitter on our own as educators or how can Twitter be used by
students on their own to connect with organization or professional societies and actually stay
in touch with them in that way?
I touched a little bit already about how popular social networking is and if we actually put
Facebook in or the number of Facebook users, global users that is, in line with global
country populations, we'd see that it would actually be the third most populous country
in the world, behind China and India.
So these new tools, if we're leveraging them for online learning, these web 2.0 tools,
they foster collaborative, participatory learning. They encourage social connections and critical
thinking through content creation, no longer just a linear transfer of knowledge; opportunities
for real world learning, connecting with others -- interviewing people who may not even live
in the same country, that now becomes possible; text, images and video -- the human voice
-- we can share this openly and so easily in our online classes and you'll see how we
can do that.; personalized learning spaces; and, essentially, community building powerhouses
-- bringing our students together, encouraging the idea that they're part of a community,
something that is more directly conveyed through a face-to-face learning environment naturally
because we're physically present together. So, if we leverage these tools in the right
way, we can really decrease a lot of isolation that occurs in an online learning environment
and often contributes to withdrawal and low retention and success rates online.
This is a really powerful quote that comes from a book that was published I think a little
over a year ago by ... actually by MIT Press and it was funded by the MacArthur Foundation,
"Since the current generation of college students has no memory of the historical moment before
the advent of the Internet, we are suggesting that participatory learning as a practice
is no longer exotic or new but a commonplace way of socializing and learning. For many,
it seems entirely unremarkable." That is a powerful statement. This book is really eye
opening and an exciting moment. The MacArthur Foundation ahs been doing a lot of work to
really investigate the way that social media and social networking, etc. is really shifting
the way that learning is occurring in our society.
And we'll take a look at VoiceThread which is a web-based or a cloud-based application
that allows for us to participate together and share ideas in peer-to-peer learning environment
using text, voice or video.
Pretty interesting -- if we take a look at what our K-12 students are saying about their
vision for learning at school -- and this is taken from the Speak Up Survey from 2009
which is put together by Project Tomorrow. We see that they want more social-based learning.
That is what excites them and what motivates them to learn. Digitally rich learning and
untethered learning, I love that concept. Moving away from having to work constantly
with paper and I see this with my own kids to work with paper -- and I see this with
my own kids, I have an 8 and a 10 year old -- it doesn't motivate them. It's not what
drives them. And learning has to be relevant if we expect our students to engage and we
do need to be thinking about how our students are connecting -- or perhaps I should say
disconnecting -- in learning environments today.
You may be surprised to take a look at this. This chart shows K-12 mobile device access
in the US in 2009. And take a look at these statistics. This doesn't necessarily mean
that they have their own smart phone or cell phone, but they have access to one. Those
numbers are pretty staggering, even when we get down to those lower grades.
And when we ask K-12 students, "What obstacles do you face when using technology at their
school?" And the number one thing they say is they cannot use their mobile device to
learn."
So, what I hope what you'll also be thinking about, you know, is the power of social technologies
to enable your learning -- to empower YOU to become a learner in this social space.
How can you be using some of the tools that we'll touch upon in this class and many others
that we won't even touch upon in this class to connect with others, to discuss with others,
to find others around the world who have your similar likes and interests and really move
us forward in this learning space because, as teachers, we always need to remain learners.
And this is an image that you will see in this class and it's really the model that
we're trying to foster: a move away from a direct transfer of information and a move
towards a learning environment that is very participatory in nature.
So, I hope that you are motivated and inspired in this class and walk away with new ideas
and we look forward to learning together as a group. Have fun!