Last week I attended a discussion of social networks in the classroom led by one of our new Assistant Professors in the English Department, Doug Eyman (his MSU homepage). In his presentation, Doug hit on what seems to be a central problem for those of us who are interested in ways we can use social networking platforms in our teaching.
According to Doug, and I think he’s very right on this, the social networks that work best are those that are based on pre-existing communities. The classroom is, let’s face it, an artificial community at best. Some group of students is thrown together for 14 weeks and asked (forced) to form communities of practice–communities that they know will dissolve shortly after the last class meeting. So it should be no surprise that the networks they form via the blogs, websites, listservs (shudder), or other networking platforms we create for them don’t really become very energetic, especially as compared to the energy they put into their Facebook groups or MySpace communities.
I’m not willing to give up, however, on social networking as a teaching and learning tool. So maybe the problem is that I’ve always tied whatever social network I set up to a particular course, rather than to some sort of larger interest community. In my own case, that larger interest community could be students interested in East Central Europe (for whatever reason). Or it could be history majors at my university. Then the students in a particular course could organize off shoot groups from the larger community (as happens so often on these networking sites).
Or we could decide that we need to keep rethinking the course as a delivery system. Because I’m not counting on this to happen any time soon, I think I’ll try the former option and see what happens.
I love the dialogue you and your colleagues are going through. I believe strongly in social networks as a teaching tool – it get’s students involved, feeling connected, and responsilble for their own eduction.
If you, your colleagues, or your readers are interested, I recommend checking out Scholar360. It’s an LMS that combines all the academic features of a Course Management System with a social network for the entire school. (Rather than just a class, it’s the whole school.)
http://www.scholar360.com
Well, speaking of experiments, I’ve created AHA and OAH groups on Facebook to see what number of such membership are Facebook users. If you are one of these, please do join so the experiment can take off!
Hi! Found your blog via the web o’ links that is the blogosphere…
“So maybe the problem is that I’ve always tied whatever social network I set up to a particular course, rather than to some sort of larger interest community.”
This is a good observation. When I was an instructional designer I worked with one faculty member who established her own meta community by creating her own wiki for her course on gothic literature in which each subsequent course participated. I thought it was an interesting idea for creating a collaborative site for content, but it still lacked the community aspect since the interest was not something derived from a sense of voluntarism but rather energized by the core curriculum of the program.
So the question is not so much whether we can create communities of practice in existing credit structures, but can we create communities of practice formed by voluntary association (like a fraternity or guild) that dictates what the credit structure of the educational experience is. Nice idea, but I am not sure what it would look like.
The point is that it is hard to establish a voluntary association of any sort (much less one that takes root in the blogosphere) inside of a social structure that was created from arbitrary rules surrounding programs of study and even accrediting bodies. You need enough people passionate about the same thing. Hence my posting here rather than on, say, the library blog at my institution!