ABSTRACT
Social media are to dorm life as distance learning is to in class learning. Technology mediates the relationships. Almost all of the communication features of social media are built into course management software. The difference is that screen that the student sees on a social media site is more personal and customizable than courseware. The oldest of these sites are Friendster and LiveJournal. They still exist but very few collegeaged students participate. Facebook is probably the most popular site at the time of this writing. However, like the formerly “most popular” site, My Space, Facebook is losing participants because of its commercialization. Sites that allow students to send short messages to friends, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendfeed and Seesmic, are gaining popularity. All of these sites do essentially the same things with slightly different details. Twitter is short messages, like the text messages from a phone, but directed at specific individuals who have chosen to follow the sender’s messages. LinkedIn is a professional networking site of interest primarily
to graduating and graduate students and technology-related professions. Seesmic uses short video messages instead of text. Friendfeed permits sending messages to multiple social sites at once. Although not thought of as a social medium, blogging is gaining popularity for its social networking. People who follow a specific blogger often leave comments to the posts on a regular basis. Over time, they create a sense of community with each other. Finally, there is the currently most extreme form of social media, Second Life, one of a series of virtual worlds that have evolved over the last twenty years. Second life enables users to communicate with others by having a graphic representation of themselves on screen with representations of the people you are talking to in real time. Several educators have created on-line courses in Second Life. The synchronous chat in the course is performed with the instructor’s and students’ representations seated in a virtual classroom. All of these refinements add more technological issues to the communication, increasing the student’s learning time for dealing with the technology without adding anything new to the on-line learning experience.
