ABSTRACT
“Don’t blog: publish.” “Stay off Twitter if you ever want a job.” “Make your classroom a no-electronics zone.” There was a time when we were told to stay off social media altogether and to teach our students to do the same. Today, whole courses are built entirely on social media. At the same time, concerns about core issues such as harassment and privacy have intensified. Social media are ever changing yet defined by a consistent sheaf of descriptive features: they are interactive by design; they involve user-generated content; they are organized around service-specific user profiles; they facilitate the development of social networks that are larger than any one service. Practices include microblogging, longer-form traditional blogging, photo sharing, video sharing and link sharing. Platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Snapchat, YouTube, Vine, WordPress, Blogger, Slack, Delicious, Diigo and many more. Even in the face-to-face classroom, instructors may craft “backchannels” for informal learner interaction via Twitter or Slack. Learners often form their own unofficial social media networks to support one another through teacher-centered courses built on one-dimensional interactions between instructor and student. In an online, decentralized, “connectivist” course, learners may be asked to literally construct their knowledge on social networks that they create themselves as the activity of the course. It is sometimes said that every hero will eventually break your heart. Similarly, even the strongest advocates for social media in education express reservations about the big platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google. Facebook long insisted on “real” names for all participants, closing the accounts of users who depend on pseudonymity for their safety “IRL” (in real life). Twitter has consistently moved toward the use of algorithms to shape a user’s “feed,” reducing the platform’s usefulness for real-time response to natural disasters and other difficulties. Twitter has so inadequately responded to harassment of its users that potential purchasers have elected not to buy the platform. Google has summarily discontinued tools once eagerly adopted by educators (Google Wave, Google Reader), leaving teachers and students in the lurch. In these contexts, how can educators and their institutions make ethical decisions about forcing learners to make social media a part of their learning? This chapter considers the value of social media for the transformative and social aspects of learning and formation in religious and theological higher education. It provides illustrative examples of social media use in face-to-face and online/blended learning environments. Also considered are pressing issues of self-disclosure, identity and thriving, especially for typically marginalized populations. Finally, decentralized social media platforms are briefly examined as holding particular hope for the ethical assignment of social media use in the evaluative contexts of higher education.
