DIGITAL & SOCIAL MEDIA AND EDUCATION

Professor David McGillivray@dgmcgillivray

#DigitalUWS

WHY?

• Building on some recent projects I’ve led: • #citizenrelay and Digital Commonwealth

• Intrigued by how schools deal with the 'affordances' of digital and social media - inside and outside the school gates

• Interested in what the ‘digital’ means to learners, teachers and parents and whether access and use are unevenly experienced according to economic, social and cultural variables

• Want to bring leadership, policy and practice together to identify and seek solutions to some important research questions

WHAT

Two main objectives:1. To consider the issue of digital and social media use in learning environments from a policy

and leadership perspective (morning session)2. To showcase and discuss digital practices already taking place in schools or as part of a

learning experience. Guiding research questions:3. To what extent does the use of digital and social media develop meaningful participation

with digital literacy and encourage more effective feedback, dialogue and interaction between learners, parents, teachers, and the institution?

4. What are the implications for time management, effective teaching and learning and workload for teachers, parents and learners themselves from an erosion of conventional boundaries between home and school facilitated by digital and social media platforms?

5. What policy, leadership, infrastructural and skills development needs arise from the integration of digital and social media into learning, extending learning activities beyond the traditional school day?

6. How can learners develop key critical thinking skills to become confident and responsible digital citizens with the necessary digital literacy competencies to contribute and create content and differentiate between sources of information, safe and risky online practices?

A PERSONAL ANECDOTE

• My 11 yr old son has a phone (peer pressure)• My 11yr old son wants Instagram (peer pressure)• My 11yr old son wants followers (popularity) • My 11 yr old son joins a group created for his school year (peer network) • My 11 yr old son gets 30 notifications an hour from said year group (distraction)• My 11 yr old son gets a copy of the maths homework that he'd left at school from

said year group (learning?)• My 11 yr old son can’t use his device at school and has never had a lesson about

digital or social media but ‘experiences’ it at home • My 11 yr old son ‘publishes’ (awareness of audience)• My wife is worried that our 11 yr old son is (quote) Always on them…

AFFORDANCES OF DIGITAL & SOCIAL MEDIA (BOYD, 2014)

• Persistence: durability on online expressions and content• Visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness• Spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared• Searchability: the ability to find information

• Young people view social media usage as a ‘cultural mindset’

• Social media empowers people as ‘creators’ rather than just ‘consumers’ – the prosumer (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010)

• Social media can decentralize, empower, mobil(e)ise (Hands, 2011) and organize (Rheingold, 2002)

• Social media enables challenge to established sources of knowledge & authority • Social media provides the “hope - that we are seeing a shift away from a 'sit back

and be told' culture towards more of a 'making and doing' culture” (Gauntlett, 2011: 8)

CYBER LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVES

• Social media is not collectively owned or without bias – it’s infused with corporate logic (Gauntlett, 2011: Fuchs, 2014)

• Social media depends upon the freely given time of millions of people and access to its benefits is not equally shared

• Social media has been appropriated as a tool for marketing and promotion – as a tool to extend consumer capitalism

‘Ultimately, from a capitalist point of view, Web 2.0 is all about sites creating ‘competitive advantages’ vis-à-vis other sites. Those that succeed (e.g. Google) will be among the titans of what

might be a new form of capitalism’ (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010, p30)

• Access to digital and social media platforms is differential “not just in terms of having the equipment and being connected, but more crucially, about the skills, confidence, and awareness necessary to use available resources and tools in a fruitful manner” (Gauntlett, 2011)

CYBER PESSIMIST PERSPECTIVES

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA AND SCHOOLS (1)

• Newer platforms can help people learn about things that they want to learn about, when they want to do so – rather than having to be somewhere and at a predetermined time

• Learning ‘chosen’, pursued as part of learning webs of individuals and groups• Horizon Report Europe: 2014 Schools Edition (Johnson et al 2014) found two major imminent trends:• the changing role of schoolteachers as a result of ICT influence, and• the impact of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are already finding their way into

classrooms• Educators are using social networks as professional communities of practice, as learning communities,

and as a platform to share interesting stories about topics students are studying in class (#ScotEdChat?)• They conclude that there “remains considerable room for leadership, especially in documenting creative

social media projects that demonstrate the benefits of social media for education” (Johnson et al, 2014: 11)It is becoming increasingly clear to schools that mobility is a key feature of the digital age, and one that

will shape the future of education. (Johnson et al, 2014: 44)

DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA AND SCHOOLS (2)

• Legitimate concerns over risk, privacy, rights• Worries over skills and competencies to cope and integrate • Issues around the availability of technological infrastructure necessary to facilitate

creative digital making • Challenges of digital leadership within and outside of schools • Uncertainty over the influence of socio-economic factors on access to, and usage

of, digital and social media:markers of class such as parents’ levels of education and occupation influence the habitus of young people, which in turn influences their digital tastes…the link between cultural capital, habitus and cultural form produces a socially entrenched digital inequality rather than an economically entrenched digital divide (Willig et al 2015: 5)

A THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

levels of digital competence in children and teenagers remain inadequate, especially on the dimensions of critical and participatory literacy,

where students do not just read content, but also engage with it and actively create their own

responses to it (Johnson et al, 2014: 26)