Introduction
The concept of introducing social networking sites as educational instruments in the broad academic landscape has been growing dramatically over the past decade as institutions of learning recognize the potential to utilize the networks as both marketing apparatuses and learning tools (Gilroy, 2010).
Indeed, scholars and educational practitioners are in agreement that social networking and other forms of internet-based communication have fundamentally transformed learning, allowing students and teachers unparalleled access to a world of knowledge and personal contacts that would have been unimaginable some twenty years ago.
The social network, according to Brydolf (2007), has emerged to be the public space that has permitted both students and teachers a sphere for their social interaction and development which is inherently comparable to the kind of public space they would have experienced in the traditional learning and teaching environment.
By undertaking a critical evaluation of the recent developments in the field of social networking, this paper aims to examine how these sites affect education from a cultural perspective in addition to evaluating their pros and cons to education.
Understanding the Concept Social Networking
The term “network” has diverse meanings and implications in diverse contexts. In layman’s terms, the word “network” implies any interconnected group, unit or system (Supe, 2008). In technical terms, however, the term may imply a system of multiple computers and other communication devices connected together for the explicit purpose of sharing information.
However, this paper will assume a socio-cultural trajectory, defining the term as a directory of interconnected or interdependent individuals maintained for personal, educational or career development, thus the increasingly popular axiom – social networking (Supe, 2008).
It is imperative to note that these interdependent systems, such as Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and Ning, among others, exist for the mutual benefit of all members.
In consequence, it is clear that social networking sites continue to radically reshape and redirect our social, educational and career lives over the span of just a couple of decades, ensnaring us into a virtual meta-world where long-established forms of interaction requires new protocols.
How Social Networking Sites Affect Education – A Socio-Cultural Perspective
According to Gunawardena et al (2009), “…the evolution of the World Wide Web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is creating subtle but profound changes in the ways human beings locate and access information, communicate with, and learn from each other” (p. 3).
These technological shifts, as postulated by the authors, are not only driving changes in individual and collective behavior, but also in ways and methodologies that people use to interact and to acquire knowledge.
As a matter of fact, the paradigms for learning and teaching have already advanced past traditional classroom models to complex yet interactive synchronous and asynchronous learning, especially in areas of collaborative learning and professional development.
In this perspective, it can be argued that social networking sites has affected education by profoundly changing embedded tradition in learning and instruction and replacing or complimenting it with conscious interconnected networks among various learners, instructors, and other stakeholders who share similar interests such as sharing of resources as well as social communications.
Social networking sites are socially and culturally defined by the virtue of the fact that they provide a platform for individuals to converge around shared interests, expectations, or causes. Through these sites, people are afforded the opportunity to post or broadcast their educational, professional and career interests to a global audience, something that traditional models of education can only dream to achieve (Supe, 2008).
Indeed, there exist a large number of online communities dedicated to education, covering a ballade of topical issues and rich academic resources. From a cultural perspective, it can be argued that these sites have to a large extent altered the way education is delivered to learners by the fact that they are able to generate interpersonal attachments among learners and teachers while promoting collective learning (Baker et al., 2009).
The global networked communities allow students and teachers to keep abreast of current knowledge and recent developments in ways that could only be imaged in a traditional instruction or teaching setup.
This observation is further reinforced by Supe (2008), who argues that social networking sites not only provide users with a sense of community, but they also create an effective channel through which people can interact with other subscribers and ultimately learn from them.
Scholars and educators have observed that the community generated by the social networking sites further creates the social fabric of learning. It should be remembered that “…the community is a group of people who learn and interact together, building relationships that result in a feeling of belonging and mutual commitment” (Gunawardena et al., 2009, p. 7).
These authors further suggests that according to the social constructionist theory, the world to a large extent is shaped by the dialogue and discourse we have with one another, implying that social networking sites can assist to build new education models through dialogue, interaction and exchange, selectively making sense of previous and current experiences.
From a cultural perspective, therefore, it can be argued that social networking sites help communities to build structures and images of what we foresee in the future and this capability have had profound effects on the education sphere.
According to the social constructionist model, it is indeed true that our comprehension of the issues that affects us in the world, including education, arises from our own collective construction of the world, implying that our daily social interaction coupled with our relationships forms the source of what is true for us (Gunawardena et al., 2009).
Given the centrality of culture to human beings and its fundamental role in mediated communication and learning, it is only fair to argue that social networking sites are affecting educational systems around the world by leading to the development of a whole new form of culture that often shadows the boundaries between real and virtual worlds.
As a result, modern education domain is being affected by virtue of the fact that those who use online social networking sites to communicate and interact identify with manifold frames of reference and repeatedly subscribe to hybrid identities that are themselves promoted by the cultural gushes made possible by the web.
Benefits & Pitfalls of Social Networking and how it has altered the Education Domain
Educators and other stakeholders have over the last couple of years viewed social networking sites with mixed feelings. Some educators view the sites as the next frontier of growth for education while others view them with a lot of skepticism mainly due to the negative outcomes that have come to be associated with the sites (Hargadon, 2010).
This section, which is an extension of the previous section, will seek to extrapolate some of the benefits and pitfalls of these sites as viewed from a cultural perspective. More importantly, the section will lay focus to analyzing how the benefits and pitfalls of these sites continue to change and alter the education sphere – again from a cultural perspective.
Benefits
To drive the education agenda forward, teachers in various disciplines need to learn new and more effective paradigms for offering instruction to their learners. According to Supe (2008), social networking sites best serves the interests of these instructors by offering them a platform through which they can continually interact with peers and mentors to discuss or brainstorm issues considered to be of relevance to the education system.
Indeed, social networking sites has evidently altered the traditional method of instruction-based, teacher-centered learning and introduced a reflective-based, learner-centered system which has the potential to not only elicit critical thinking and problem-solving capacities, but it also allows for critical reconstruction of issues to facilitate professional development for educators (Hargadon, 2010).
In this perspective, it can be safely argued that social networking has dramatically altered the 21st century landscape in education by virtue of the fact that it does not only shape how students approach learning, but also how instructors approach teaching and how they are able to interrelate with, and learn from, each other.
According to Hargadon (2010), Web 2.0 – the technical framework that feeds the social networking sites – have enabled students and teachers to contribute, collaborate and create educational resources for use by other community members who may be thousands of miles away.
Davis (2010) is more straightforward, suggesting that the social networks have not only crumbled the physical barriers that existed in the delivery of education, but the cultural barriers that were predominant in traditional models of education delivery are increasingly being expunged by communities of members who may not necessarily share the same cultural orientation but share similar interests.
In this perspective, it can be argued that the colossal cultural disparities that not so long ago served as barriers to knowledge acquisition among and between individuals, groups, and populations are now being cut down to size, courtesy of these social networking sites.
This, according to Barbour & Plough (2009), therefore implies that more students, especially from disadvantaged cultural backgrounds, will benefit immensely from educational resources, training tools and proactive collaboration with their peers in developed countries and vice versa.
Of critical importance to this paper is the observation that in their pursuit to broaden the scope of modern education, social networking is dismantling traditional cultures that bonded on issues of race, color, socio-economic status, and geographical locality, and replacing them with a form of a modern culture that intrinsically bonds on common interests and shared causes. This is good for the education sector.
Ryan et al (2011) are of the opinion that some social networking sites such as Facebook “…can aid students in their educational and cultural adaptation process when beginning a new program of study” (p. 126).
Concepts such as self-efficacy, self-regulation, self-disclosure, motivation and affective learning are culturally oriented, and current research have found that social networking sites can be effectively used to bring out the best in the above mentioned concepts (Burgess, 2009).
An international student, for example, can learn a great deal about the education system of a country he or she is intending to study in, methods of instruction, teacher competencies and the way of life in such a country.
In line with the above, a study cited by Ryan et al (2011) revealed that social networking sites promotes a sense of connectedness between the teacher and learners, not mentioning the fact that they enhance self-efficacy before the start of a new course by availing a framework through which the learners can reveal the teacher’s profile in an effort to acquaint themselves with the teacher.
Such flexibility could only be imagined in traditional models of education. Another study, also cited by Ryan (2011), found that some socio-cultural elements, such as motivation, affective learning, morale, trust and classroom climate, are inarguably affected by the level of the teacher’s self-disclosure via available social networking sites.
This therefore implies that the sites can be effectively used to inform and positively influence some culturally-oriented concepts (self-efficacy, self-regulation, motivation, self-disclosure, trust etc), which in turn may affect the nature and scope of education delivery.
Salavuo (2008) cited in Ryan et al (2011) had implicitly conceptualized that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook will be better suited for collaborative pedagogical approaches due to the fact that students will be afforded the framework to not only be in control of the environment, but the information posted on their personal profiles will be instrumental in highlighting their unique expertise and shared interests, thus further building and reinforcing a sense of community and presenting an opportunity to both learn from each other in addition to learning by tutoring and coaching others.
This, in my view, has profoundly changed and altered the education domain by the very fact that education is taking a more proactive and integrative approach than traditional models could allow.
Students from all over the world can now freely interact with peers and mentors to conceptualize and work on issues, brainstorm, problem-solve, and share educational information, make critical decisions, and create learning protocols, all of which enrich the learning experience (Supe, 2008). The realization of social networking tools, therefore, is promising to take education to the next frontier of growth.
Apart from the obvious advantage of instant mobility, social networking sites afford students and educators an exceptional support for multimedia formats which makes it possible to upload presentations linked to cultural, educational and entertainment phenomena (Supe, 2008; Foulger et al., 2009; Gilroy, 2010).
Such formats, according to the authors, allow users to share content from diverse cultural and sociopolitical backgrounds at the click of a mouse.
In addition, multimedia formats facilitates greater interpersonal knowledge which is rich in cultural context and even more richer in educational context, not mentioning the fact that such multimedia formats also facilitates faster community building, collaboration and participation (Supe, 2008; Burgess, 2009 ).
Students, for instance, may no longer have access to academic resources discussed in class after the lapse of a semester or a course unit, but the social networking platforms affords them the opportunity for longer-term, ongoing relationships between the students and the academic resources.
Indeed, the students can make revisions, find information on a specific educational subject from the global community to clear any confusion, and contact their teachers for clarification or instruction at their own convenience (Supe, 2008). Such beneficial attributes heralds a new dawn for the education sector.
A number of socio-cultural theories postulate that some students fail to perform in class due to their introverted nature. The social networking sites have greatly assisted educators to overcome this hurdle as they can now encourage shy and introverted students to participate in online book discussion blogs and writing for real audiences (Brydolf, 2007).
In line with this line of argument, it has been observed that modern students are in most cases bored by traditional pedagogy, whereby they are forced to sit quietly in a classroom and listen to the lectures provided by the instructor; on the contrary, they feel much more comfortable being active participants in the learning discussions, and online social networking protocols offer just the right environment to engage in such educational interactions.
Contextually, it can therefore be argued that social networking sites have indeed altered the education sphere from a reactive teacher-centered approach to a proactive student-centered approach.
According to Ganawardena et al (2009), an important component in most of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Flicker and LinkedIn is the “…user generated content enabling sharing, co-creating, co-editing, and co-construction of knowledge reflecting the collective intelligence of the users” (p. 5).
This, in consequence, has enabled students to acquire educational materials that are richer in content and scope than traditional teaching and instruction methods can allow, thus is a step in the right direction. What’s more, the collective intelligence of the users has been found to facilitate more democratic use of the sites, propelling the educational agenda forward.
This capability has been useful in not only propagating more effective and fulfilling learning models, but also in the building of more open and knowledgeable societies and making it possible for people of different racial groupings, localities, and viewpoints to communicate (Gunawardena et al., 2009). Indeed, the world has become more democratic and political systems have been strengthened by the social networking sites.
It should be remembered that social networking sites were recently used by subjugated masses of Tunisia and Libya to overthrow sitting presidents who had blatantly refused to cede authority even after being in power for over two decades. The same is currently happening in Libya and some Arab countries in the Middle East and it is suggestive of not only political enlightenment, but educational enlightenment as well.
Pitfalls
Social networking sites, as is the case with other noteworthy breakthroughs, have their own dark side. One of the most reverberating disadvantages of social media is the tendency by users to post culturally unacceptable materials on their sites (Brydolf, 2007).
Supe (2008), on his part, argues that some educators are increasingly worried about using social networking platforms in educational context because they are often associated with culturally undesirable outcomes such as narcissism, shattered time, destroyed reputations and other dangerous social activities.
Under these circumstances, the sites can no longer be classified as tools to assist in education, but weapons of character and personality destruction.
Some educators have also raised the issue of authenticity of educational resources found in the social networking sites (Supe, 2008). The accuracy of some responses that are intended for use by either the students or educators is open to debate, hence raising the red flag that we may indeed be feeding users with incorrect or unauthenticated information.
This is a major worry for educators, parents as well as stakeholders. Still, it has been claimed in some quarters that the relationships made on social networking sites are mostly phony and short-term by virtue of the fact that the amount of effort required to develop the relationships is minimal (O’Hanlon, 2007).
This assertion, in part, is supported by the theory of socialization which purports that nurture or environmental factors play a significant role in establishing any meaningful relationship, thus individuals cannot claim to really know each other in space (Ramig, 2009). Lastly, educators fear that they are fast losing control of their students to the social networking sites.
Conclusion
From the discussion, one thing is clear – the popularity of social networking site as educational instruments is skyrocketing. Indeed, it can now be safely argued that institutions of learning have no choice whether they want to employ social media in educational contexts; they must embrace these interactive technologies as a matter of urgency since the benefits far outweigh the risks (Gilroy, 2010).
To prevent students from accessing undesirable pages, institutions should invest in firewalls and filtering software, and education on using the sites for social as well as educational gain should be imparted on students to make the interactions and participation more meaningful.
It can be said with an almost certainty that social networking sites and other multi-user virtue environments such as Second Life presents the next frontier of growth in the education sector.
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