New research suggests that social media is becoming a widely used tool in the classroom. Praetorian Marketing asks, is social media a tool for learning or a distraction?
Direct marketing company Praetorian Marketing has been using social media for some time to interact with their clients and their customers but social media really found its greatest market in university students. If you’ve watched The Social Network, the story of how Facebook was founded, you’ll know that originally all users had to have a university email address to register. It might come as no surprise then that university lecturers are starting to use social media as an educational tool.
A 2010 study of nearly 2,000 university staff by education publisher Pearson found that many considered YouTube to be a “very valuable” classroom aid. Nearly two-thirds of the lecturers studied said that they had used at least one social media site in their class, but 53% said Facebook and 46% said Twitter add “negative value.” Praetorian Marketing wonders, is it a case of some social media being more useful that others then?
It would appear so. Different lecturers seem to have different opinions on social media. When the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology blocked access to popular social media sites for a week last semester as an exercise, 25% of participating students reported having “better concentration in the classroom.” However the opposite was true at the University of Missouri Praetorian Marketing found. Journalism professor Jen Lee Reeves encourages her students to Tweet about the topic that they are discussing in class. She believes that “it turns into kind of a live, flowing notebook of what we’ve discussed in class.”
So what’s do the researchers think? Praetorian Marketing hands over to Reynol Junco from Lock Haven University. “The more research we do, the more we understand that it’s about nuances in how the technologies are used, not whether or not they’re used, that matters in the classroom.”
Managing Director of Praetorian Marketing Peter Rudge believes that we will see more and more social media used in schools and universities. “Just as the internet has become an integral part of daily life, social media has too. No student would choose to function without the internet, it would put them at a disadvantage in terms of the resources they could access. The same is increasingly becoming true of social media. YouTube tutorials and Facebook discussion groups are becoming more and more widely used.”
So it seems that when used in the right setting, social media is a powerful tool for learning. Praetorian Marketing encourages students to log-out when they’re meant to be revising though!
