Future Directions

Author(s):  
Ann M. Simpson

This chapter considers future directions for emerging social media technologies and their potential for teaching and learning practice in higher education. While technologies that support social media constantly change, it provides some simple and practical guidelines to assist teachers with their practice and use of social media technologies in their classrooms. This chapter acknowledges the evolving nature of the technologies available in today's teaching and learning context as well as ones that are considered to impact higher educational learning and teaching in the future, including descriptions of augmented and virtual reality and gamification and gamified learning.

Author(s):  
Julie Willems ◽  
Chie Adachi ◽  
Francesca Bussey ◽  
Iain Doherty ◽  
Henk Huijser

The integration of social media into higher education is having a significant impact on learning and teaching. As they become enmeshed in the fabric of academia, they are also becoming a site of contestation, especially in relation to teaching and learning. This research paper explores the key issues dominating current debates about the use of social media in higher education in Australasia. By exploring themes emerging from a debate around the use of social media in higher education in Australasia, it integrates additional comments from the collective wisdom of experienced colleagues from around the globe, as captured in the debate’s Twitter feed and live Periscope streaming. These comments highlight points of sensitivity in the adoption of social media in higher education in Australasia. This paper presents the findings and some key ideas that emerged from the debate.


Author(s):  
Chaka Chaka

This chapter reports on a study—conducted in 2011—that employed two social media networks, Facebook and MXit, as educational tools at one university in South Africa. MXit is a South African-based social networking application. The study involved a cohort of second year Bachelor of Education in English undergraduate students at this university as its participants. The latter were required to utilize Facebook and MXit to engage in both asynchronous formal writing and synchronous paragraph writing, respectively. All this took place outside participants’ tutorial class schedule. In this study, participants were able to produce asynchronous formal writing samples in varying degrees using Facebook. Similarly, they were also able to produce synchronous written paragraphs using MXit even though some paragraphs displayed a high degree of linguistic textisms. Other affordances that these two social media technologies offered the participants in this study are: anytime, any day, and anywhere asynchronous and synchronous learning; asynchronous and synchronous feedback; virtual incidental learning; socially situated online learning; and Presence Awareness Learning (PAL). In conclusion, the study suggests that there are further affordances that these two social media technologies can offer higher education. These are: supplemental teaching and learning; cloud storage for teaching and learning materials (in the case of Facebook); virtual platforms for revision; digital platforms for micro-teaching and micro-learning (in respect of MXit); and value-added platforms for just-in-time mobile teaching and learning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 2040023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mamoun Masoud Abdulqader ◽  
Yousof Zohair Almunsour

This research aims to investigate the effects of social media use on higher education teaching and learning as well as the students’ academic performance. A total of 275 students and faculty members from the College of Computer Science and Information Technology at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University took part in the study. The participants answered survey questions to analyse information on their use of social media in education and how that has affected their teaching, learning and grades. A majority of the participants reported that they used social media in training. However, they also stated that social media platforms were beneficial in academic matters. The number of participants who stated that the use of social media in learning helped improve their grades was 43%. The other 57% thought that social media had no impact on their grades or had an adverse effect or were undecided.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. p478
Author(s):  
Jorge F. Figueroa ◽  
Emarely Rosa-Dávila

This article presents a study on the perspective of two higher education professors from Puerto Rico in the use of social media for the ESL classroom. It covers the millennial generation characteristics and its influence on the teaching and learning process at the university level. Several strategies within the use of social media and emergent technologies are presented. The study participants reflect on the use of social media in the classroom and present how beneficial it has been in student achievement, retention, and engagement. Several remarks are made within the use of social media for the classroom and participants expose their experiences in the ESL classroom at the university level.


Author(s):  
Eddie Mumba Mulenga ◽  
José María Marbàn

Social media technologies have reshaped our lives today and Zambian teachers do a massive use of smart phones, tablets, and other portable tools. In addition, they are continually searching for forefront innovations. Frequently, the utilization of these gadgets is not in manners foreseen by innovation advocates. This study focuses on exploring the use of social media platforms and the impact of such social networking services in the teaching and learning of mathematics by pre-service teachers. To explore pre-service teachers’ use of social media in their teaching and learning experiences, the authors administered an adapted and validated research instrument via a quantitative survey system to a sample of 102 pre-service teachers from the Copperbelt University. Analysis of variance and multiple regression analysis were used to test the interplay of relationships between pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards the use of social media based on year of study and gender, social media use and classroom integration, social media use, and mathematics pedagogy. Further, a statistical test was run to show whether positive correlations existed or not. Results disclosed that respondents showed an average use of social media tools in mathematics and provide a prediction model for pre-service teachers’ future integration of social media in the teaching and learning of mathematics.


Author(s):  
Khalil Alsaadat

Technology and social media have presented significant tools for adult learners to learn and advance continually. Fast technological advancements have enabled development of technologies used for learning. Expansion of various tools has given professors, educaters, trainers, instructers, many alternatives towards the implementation of the technology supported learning. The use of social media can improve adult learning outcomes and academic accomplishment. Social media is increasingly proven to be beneficial in adult learning and has a huge potential for adult education. This paper sheds some lights on benefits of social media for adult learners, this is incorporated through the review of previous work and some barriers that encounters social media for learning purposes. Also some social media models are reviewed to show the growth and effect of social media in adult learning context, and suggestions and recommendations are provided.


Author(s):  
Tamara R. Meredith ◽  
Scott J. Warren

Although faculty may not believe that they are legitimately “teaching” while engaging with students via Facebook, results of interviews and publicly available Facebook data clearly document intentional music faculty activities that fit the description of teaching through enculturation. This situates the phenomenon of Facebook groups firmly within the larger apprenticeship model in use in music departments; the process of enculturation through Facebook is used to teach new apprentices how to become functional members of their musical communities. Recommendations generated from the research and discussed in this chapter include addressing faculty concerns about personal and professional risk, departmental development of guidelines for Facebook group use and management that is based in enculturation theory, and training for music faculty in the use of social media channels as opportunities for teaching and learning.


Author(s):  
Chien Yu

This chapter provides the readers with an overview of the use of social media technologies and how the media is applied in adult teaching and learning environment. It examines the current educational purpose of using social media based on a review of scholarly publications. The aim is to keep up-to-date changes in social media, and to better understand the paradigm shift, including the trends and issues pertinent to the application of social media in adult learning. The chapter reviews the literature on the benefit of using social media and provides strategies and guidelines for adult instruction using social media. The chapter discusses some challenges facing social media use in adult teaching and learning. The idea is to help the reader determine if social media is a valuable tool to improve learning and develop better instructional strategies for engaging students and stimulating academic dialogue using social media.


2018 ◽  
pp. 837-855
Author(s):  
Vasileios Paliktzoglou ◽  
Jarkko Suhonen

This chapter is part of a series of studies related to the use of social media tools in higher education. In particular, the authors investigate the students' level of familiarity, engagement, and frequency of use of social media technologies. They analyze the experiences of using the Edmodo tool to support PBL, and they relate participants' opinions regarding the use of the tool. The data was collected using two questionnaires and a focus group interview at the end of the course. The main findings of this study are comparable and somehow familiar to their previous study (Paliktzoglou & Suhonen, 2014). Moreover, with regards to the adoption of Edmodo as a learning tool to support PBL, although literature argues that cultural differences play an important role in the acceptance of learning tools (i.e., Cheung, Chiu, & Lee, 2011), the results indicate that Edmodo has a positive reception as learning tool in blended learning to support PBL.


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