In the modern era, social media is used more than ever by students and professors to learn and communicate with each other, and though these tools have great potential, they are often inhibited by the unfortunate controversies that have emerged from relationships that are deemed too intimate between student and teacher, as well as the abuse of Internet by students for non-educational purposes.
Currently, friendship with teachers on Facebook is still highly frowned upon. Almost no teacher will accept friend requests from students from the risk of being under fire from administrators. In place of using Facebook or twitter, teachers will still send emails to parents.
Although the tools for instantaneous sharing have been in place for several years, schools are only just beginning to catch on to them; if at all. Using social media for education and collaboration has been going on since the first instant messengers became widely available, but it is because of the ease of using these tools for non-educational purposes that schools have been slow to use these in the first place.
Many school districts place blocks on their Internet services provided to students, censoring anything not deemed school appropriate or necessary for education. These blocking services almost invariably block all forums, methods of social communication, and social media websites that have a wide range of uses. This ultimately provokes students to use proxies, which are services that allow students to go around blocks. Albeit proxies do render blocks ineffective, they also only make the most basic of websites available due to slow speed. Sadly, these same websites that can be used for entertainment can be used for education as well.
In my school district alone I have seen numerous examples of this. For several years YouTube had remained blocked, and then when it became unblocked for a month the students did nothing but watch videos for entertainment. For the next 4 years the school district kept YouTube (and Facebook, and Twitter) blocked, until they figured out how to grant teachers unlimited access while keeping the students mostly restricted. This year as the teachers began to get into the groove of using social media to teach, they’ve found it very useful in effectively teaching a lesson with detailed visuals and concise explanations. Using a YouTube video to explain the the basics of the aerodynamics of an airplane and how flight is achieved, my engineering teacher cut a 45 minute white-board session into an enjoyable 6 minute lesson, which was finished before the students could lose focus.
Seeing this efficiency, it promises that social media will revolutionize the classroom. More students will be able to learn a topic in a fraction of the time, and as social constraints loosen they will be able to more openly communicate with their professors and teachers, while rapidly collaborating entire projects together with one another. It may be inevitable that some students will continue to use twitter and Facebook and YouTube for purely entertainment purposes, but they will consequently separate themselves from those who want to learn. Those professors which utilize these tools will see their students push far more ahead in education than those of teachers that don’t.
Sources:
http://rt.com/usa/news/missouri-facebook-student-sex/
http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/jwbrown3/EPS%20313/filter/intro%20paper.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/pointofview/2010/09/facebook-does-social-media-belong-in-classrooms.html