Week 9: Social Media

How Media Ecologies Can Address Diverse Student Needs, an article published in College Teaching January 2009, concludes that "diverse media are valued by students and likely to contribute to greater learning . . . A rich ecology of media appears to enhance student learning."

The ecology metaphor seems fitting as it is illustrated in this graphic showing the branches of learning media. With current research showing that social media can benefit students with diverse needs, it seems that it is worth the risk and effort to try and teach K-12 students to use these tools appropriately.



The challenge for me is the experimental nature of including all the "new" media into my instructional plans and finding that sometimes my ideas don't work or that the technology isn't quite what I needed. There's always troubleshooting, redesigning, and a lot of learning through trial and error.

According to Cris Worsnop, a media literacy expert, all of these challenges are often part of a media educator's experience including using social media and the type of teaching it takes to learn new literacies.

"If you scratch a media educator, you will often reveal a progressive educator who has been attracted to the subject by the likelihood that progressive pedagogy will be a perfect fit to the content. Media classrooms often display the following characteristics, typical of
progressive education:

* Group and collaborative work is encouraged and rewarded
* Independent and project work is encouraged and rewarded
* Self- and peer assessment is practiced and acknowledged in final grades
* Abstractions including creativity, originality, and experimentation are encouraged and rewarded
* It is not a problem when a student knows more than a teacher
* The process of work is valued, sometimes as much as or more than the product
* Sometimes work is undertaken without a clear expectation for the outcome
* Risk taking, experimentation, investigation, and discovery are all acknowledged as powerful learning tools"

Worsnop's writing appears online at the Center for Media Literacy. The quote above is from Reading Online, the journal of the International Reading Association.