The Social Network Classroom

Peter Bunus

Department of Computer and Information Science Linköping University, Sweden

petbu@ida.liu.se

Abstract. Online social networking is an important part in the everyday life of college students. Despite the increasing popularity of online social networking among students and faculty members, its educational benefits are largely untested. This paper presents our experience in using social networking applications and video content distribution websites as a complement of traditional classroom education. In particular, the solution has been based on effective adaptation, extension and integration of Facebook, Twitter, Blogger YouTube and iTunes services for delivering educational material to students on mobile platforms like iPods and 3rd generation mobile phones. The goals of the proposed educational platform, described in this paper, are to make the learning experience more engaging, to encourage collaborative work and knowledge sharing among students, and to provide an interactive platform for the educators to reach students and deliver lecture material in a totally new way.

Keywords: Social networking, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.

1 Introduction

Teens and college students, ages 12 to 28 years, have quickly embraced online technologies that enable social, communicative and creative uses. They are more likely than other age categories to send and receive email messages, play online games, create blogs, download music, search for school information online or simply spending time online. They are used that information is delivered in this way. Traditional classroom education simply does not fulfill anymore the expectation of students. Use of media and modern means of interaction has literally rewired the way that our students think and process information.

According to a December 2008 survey performed by Lenhart 2009 [5] for the PEW Internet and American Life Project the share of the adult users who have a profile on an online social network has grown from 8% in 2005 to 35% in December 2008. It is worth noticing that the social network users are equally likely to be men and women, and also more likely to be young: 75% of adults between 18 and 24 have an online profile as do 57% of adults between 25 and 35, according to the same study. Moreover 68% of full time students and 71% of part-time students have a social network profile.

It is even more interesting to take a look in the kind of activities those young people are engaging themselves when they are online. Table 1 depicts the

generational differences in online activities according to another study performed by Jones and Fox 2009 [4] for PEW Internet and American Life Project. It can be noticed that a large proportion of the people with ages between 18-28 years (the typical age of college students) are using the internet for watching videos online (72%), send instant messages (59%), reading blogs (43%) or use social networking sites (67%). The survey from Table 1 shows that teens and younger people ages 18-32 are significantly more likely than older users to send and receive instant messages, playing online games, create blogs or download videos.

Table 1. Generational differences in online activities according to Jones and Fox 2009 [4]

 Online Teens (12‐17) 

Gen Y (18‐32) 

Gen X (33‐44) 

Younger Boomers (45‐54) 

Older Boomers(55‐63) 

Silent Generation(64‐72) 

G.I Generation 

(73+) 

All Online Adults 

Go online  93%  87%  82%  79%  70%  56%  31%  74% 

Play games online  78  50  38  26  28  25  18  35 Watch  videos online  57  72  57  49  30  24  14  52 Get info about a job  30  64  55  43  36  11  10  47 Send instant messages  68  59  38  28  23  25  18  38 Use social networking sites  65  67  36  20  9  11  4  35 Download music  59  58  46  22  21  16  5  37 Create SNS profile  55  60  29  16  9  5  4  29 Read blogs  49  43  34  27  25  23  15  32 Create a blog  28  20  10  6  7  6  6  11 Visit a virtual world  10  2  3  1  1  1  0  2 

The goal of the pedagogical study presented in this paper was to leverage and use for educational purposes the new online technologies that the students are already using in their every day work or in their free time. It this way, we have tried to make the learning experience of the students more effective and engaging. We propose the use and integration of social networking sites, podcasting technologies and applications developed for mobile devices into a collaborative online educational platform called eSocialClasroom. Our expectation was that the eSocialClasroom should encourage collaborative work and knowledge sharing among students and function as a platform for the educators to reach the students and deliver lecture material in a totally new way.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the technical architecture of the eSocialClasroom platform. In Section 3 we present some of the preliminary results of our teaching experiment and the social and educational benefits of the project that we have observed during the duration of this experiment. Finally, Section 4 presents our conclusions and future work.

2 Technical Architecture of the eSocialClasroom

Traditionally class material is delivered to the student in a printed form during the lecture or electronically via the course webpage. However the delivered electronic content via the webpage, in most of the cases, is in the form of a pdf file of the lecture slides and can be only visualized on a computer. From the teacher point of view this is a very convenient way of delivering the classroom material: it can be done very

quickly and requires little technical knowledge about web technologies. From the students point of view this will require some discipline like checking regularly the course web page for updates and for new material. It is a safe communication channel between the teacher and the students. However there are several disadvantages with this approach: Firstly, the material available on the course webpage is available only for computers and cannot be visualized on mobile devices. Moreover the material is seldom interactive or exploits the available multimedia technologies. Secondly, the students enrolled in a course hardly know their classmates or have course related interaction. Their interaction is limited to the breaks between the lecture hours or during the laboratory sessions.

To overcome some of these problems, we propose an educational platform called eSocialClasrrom (see Fig. 1 below) that combines Web 2.0 technology, social networking and mobile application for delivering educational material to the student in a new and innovative way.

Fig. 1. The architecture of the proposed eSocialClasroom platform.

The eSocialClasroom Platform was built on Web 2.0 and mobile technologies and experimentally deployed for a one semester Computer Science class (Design Patterns) at Linköping University, Sweden. The experiment has been performed during a three months period. In addition to the normal course web page the following components have been used:

iTunes and YouTube for podcasting course related multimedia content to the students. Audio files and classroom related video content like recoded lecture sessions combined with slideshow presentations have been automatically podcasted to students. The classroom material podcasted by the teacher is automatically downloaded to the student’s mobile device (IPhones, Ipods or mobile phones), so the students receive an up to date material. During this project we have also developed interactive mobile teaching applications for IPhone and ITouch devices.

Use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for distribution of course announcements, course related link, interactive slide shows and quizzes. In this way students can have access to additional course material is a new and innovative way while they can also know each other better and interact during the course. A special Facebook group was created for the students enrolled in the Design Patterns course. 71% of all the students enrolled in the Design Pattern Class have also joined the Facebook group. The Facebook group enrolment was optional.

Blogger for a forum on which students can express themselves on issues related to the course that they are following, can propose new ideas or present their original view and which requires a deeper presentation of subject under discussion. In this way the dialog among students and between students and teachers have been extended well beyond the classroom environment.

3 Project Benefits

The student’s participation and usage of the eSocialClasroom components was optional and was considered as an extracurricular course activity. During the one semester deployment of the eSocialClasroom platform the following benefits have been observed:

3.1 Social Benefits

The study performed by Ellison et al. 2007 [1] indicates a clear association between the use of a social network site like Facebook and three types of social capital: bonding social capital, bridging social capital and maintained social capital, as defined by Putnam 2007 [7]. Social capital, in this context refers to the resources accumulated through the relationships among people. Bonding is the strongest form of social capital and it is usually manifested among individuals that are belonging to a homogenous category like family, very close friends or even criminal gangs. Bridging is usually manifested among individuals with the same goals or similar interests like a sport team, classmates or neighbors. The third form of social capital called maintained refers to relationships that are kept despite the fact that a significant change has happened in the social networks of the individuals. As an example, a social relationship with former high school classmate that is located now in a different geographic location and has different interest compared to ours can be considered to be a maintained relations.

A high social capital is generally considered to be closely related to positive outcomes for the society in general and a better psychological “wellbeing” of the individuals that is part of the high social capital group. For individuals and for the students in particular the accumulated social capital allows them to benefit from the “social network wisdom” in form of useful information, personal relationships that will directly affect their academic life with future extension to their professional life. Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are actually designed to exploit bridging and maintained social capital (people who kind of know but you wouldn’t chat with). According to the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter 1973 [2] weak ties are more likely than strong ties to provide new information and

opportunities like a new job or new career path. The resources of the bonding social capital are probably very similar while the weak ties will provide a much larger diversity.

All the three types of social capitals were visible in the developed relationships inside the Facebook group that we have created for the course. The accumulation of bonding and bridging social capital was very evident among the members. The students very quickly developed a “course identity” extending to personal social relationships despite the fact of the cultural diversity of the class members. The bridging capital was not only limited to the students enrolled in the course. Several other external members with interest in computer science have also joined the group together with other academic people interested in educational aspects of the social networks. An unexpected aspect was that we have also observed several instances of maintained relationships in which former students from previous years have joined the course social network site and interacted with students or the teacher.

3.2 Educational Benefits for the Students

The following scenario illustrates a typical usage of the proposed eSocialClasroom platform. The scenario is based on the interviews performed on three students at the end of the course. The names used in the following use case scenario are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

Anna Svenson, a student of University of Linköping, Sweden, is enrolled in the Computer Science program in her last study year. Soon is time for Anna to choose a final master project. Anna lives 50 km (31 miles) from the university in a city called Norrkoping and every day she takes the campus buss to Linköping to attend her lectures. In our scenario we can see her waiting for the bus at the central station. She has arrived a little bit earlier to the station and while waiting for the buss she flips open her mobile phone and start writing an SMS message to her friend. After finishing sending the message she decides to check what her friends are doing on Facebook. She connects to Facebook using the mobile phone and she can immediately see that Angelica her classmate has posted some pictures from the last week party. A smile on her face immediately appears while looking at the pictures. There is also a friendship request from a former classmate David. David was an exchange student from Australia, that Anna met two years ago, but after 6 month spent at Linköping University, David went back home. She did not hear from David since then. Anna accepts his invitation and immediately access David’s profile. Now she can see that David become a graduate student at Carnegie Melon University in USA. “This is great” thinks Anna, because she would like to enroll for a graduate program at a university in USA after her graduation. “Now I can ask David how this can be done, he surely went through this already and he might be able to help me”. She quickly writes a message to David then she is navigating back to the Facebook home page to see what else happened with her friends. Then she notices that there are some new postings from the Facebook group of the Design Patterns course (see Fig 2) in which she is enrolled this term. The teacher just posted a small video from YouTube in which Alan Kay a famous computer scientist explains the functionality of an early computer graphics system developed at MIT in the late 60s. Anna remembers that her

professor mentioned something about that computer system during the last lecture. She watches the four minutes short movie and indeed now she clearly sees the connection between the computer science notions that her teacher presented and the computer graphics system developed at MIT.

She decides to check further the messages on Facebook but the bus has arrived. Now it is time for a quite boring 50 min trip to Linköping. She close the mobile phone, shows the ticket to the bus driver than she takes a sit in the bus. “What a boring trip” – says Anna trying to figure out what to do during this trip that she need to make it every day. She searches her pockets and finds the ITouch in the internal pocket of the jacket. “This trip it will not be so boring after all if I listen to some music” – thinks Anna and carefully removes the protective cover of the ITouch. While searching for her favorite song she notices that the animated slideshows of the latest Design Patterns Lecture together with the sound recording of the lecture have been automatically downloaded to her iPod via the a podcasting service. “Oh, Great” – Anna says “Now actually I can check what the professor said during the lecture about the MIT computer graphics system”. She opens the video file and the she find the sequence where the professors explain the MIT systems. She listens to the explanations while watching the animated slide show (see Fig 3). “Now everything is much clear” – thinks Anna and she continue to watch the lecture movie for five more minutes. Then she remembers that she had some difficulties with the latest laboratory work for that course. She was simply not able to compile the latest program on her machine. She decides to check the course discussion forum on the course Facebook. Maybe some of her colleagues have already solved that problem. Anna opens again her mobile phone then and check the forum. Unfortunately nobody posted a solution to her problem. She decides to post a question to her problem on the Facebook group discussion forum. She starts writing the question and after finishing she push the publish button. “Maybe somebody will help me” – hopes Anna. She notices a flashing banner in the right corner “Amy Eriksson took an object-oriented programming skills quiz. Her score is 85. Could you beat her score? “I’m sure that I can beat her score” – thinks Anna very confidently. The quiz was made by the teacher of the design pattern course and consists

 

Fig. 2. The Design Pattern Course Facebook page accessed from a mobile phone

 

Fig. 3. Recording of a Design Course lecture running on an Apple ITouch.

of 15 programming questions similar to those that will be given during the exam. Anna starts working on the quiz. It is actually harder than she thought at the beginning. She finishes the quiz after 15 min with the final score of 82. Well, she did not beat Amy but she can see that 42 other colleagues have taken the quiz and she has a score that it is in the top 10 of her class. “It is not bad” - she thinks. While she is contemplating the quiz statistics there are two incoming messages that inform her that two answers were posted to the discussion thread that she opened 15 min ago. Two classmates, Mark and Spencer have both posted a solution to Anna’s problem. “Ohh it was so easy to solve it. How could I miss that compilation directive?”

The buss finally arrived at the campus and Anna takes the shortest way to the C Building where her lecture that she intends to attend will start in 10 min. Plenty of time left to “tweet” a message to her friends: “I feel :-) today despite the rainy weather in Linköping.”

4 Conclusions

The proposed eSocialClasroom platform was adapted very quickly by the students despite the fact that students expect social networks to be social and not necessarily educational. At the end of this experiment we could clearly see the potential of social networks as an educational tool for extending the traditional classroom education. However the educational benefits of social networks are largely untested. Much of the existing academic research on social networks and in particular on Facebook has focused on the social benefits aspects (Ellison et al. 2007 [1], Valenzuela et al. 2009 [8], Zywica and James 2008 [9]) including studies on differences among users and non-users of social networks (Hargittai 2008 [3]) or privacy, identity and security aspects (Lewis et al. 2008 [6]). We are not aware of any detailed studies that address effects of the social networking sites in the relationship between professors and students or between students in classroom settings despite the fact that many faculty members have already a social network based classroom presence.

We intend to repeat the experiment and the deployment of the eSocialClasroom platform again during the fall term 2010. The student satisfaction and learning improvement will be systematically measured by conducting interviews with the students and systematic evaluation of the impact that the proposed framework has on the learning process. The didactical success of the system can be defined by the student satisfaction and the degree of how much the eSocialClasroom boosts collaboration of students that would otherwise work on their own. Before extending the project at other courses we need however to answer several questions:

Is there sufficient proof of educational value to consider the proposed platform as an alternative/complement and as a non conventional way to classical information distribution (printed lecture notes and course web page)?

What would be the effect of such an information distribution and how much will involve the students?

Will it improve learning or it will distract the students from their usual course work?

How teacher would embrace this new technology and way of teaching and how will impact our traditional way of preparing teaching materials?

References

[1] Ellison Nicole B., Steinfield Charles, and Lampe Cliff. (2007) "The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 12: 4, pp. 1143-1168, 2007.

[2] Granovetter Mark S. (1973) "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78: 6, pp. 1360, 1973.

[3] Hargittai Eszter. (2008) "Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13: 1, pp. 276-297, 2008.

[4] Jones Sydney and Susannah Fox, "Generations Online in 2009," PEW Internet & American Life Project, 2009.

[5] Lenhart Amanda, "Adults and social network websites," PEW Interned & American Life Project, 2009.

[6] Lewis Kevin, Kaufman Jason, and Christakis Nicholas. (2008) "The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 14: 1, pp. 79-100, 2008.

[7] Putnam Robert D. (2007) "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 30: 2, pp. 137-174, 2007.

[8] Valenzuela Sebastián, Park Namsu, and F. Kee Kerk. (2009) "Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use and College Students' Life Satisfaction, Trust, and Participation." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 14: 4, pp. 875-901, 2009.

[9] Zywica Jolene and Danowski James. (2008) "The Faces of Facebookers: Investigating Social Enhancement and Social Compensation Hypotheses; Predicting Facebook; and Offline Popularity from Sociability and Self-Esteem, and Mapping the Meanings of Popularity with Semantic Networks." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 14: 1, pp. 1-34, 2008.