reflection after the first PBL-meeting
Photo of a hash tag by Jon Tyson, from Unsplash
Is there a relation between your activity on social media and your digital literacy? In my opinion no. Bu if you start analyzing it from the perspective oa the article on Digital literacy you might get another picture. If you are active on several social medias you are forced to practice different digital skills. If you are present on LinkedIn you practice your career and identity management. If you use social media platforms to learn more about your special interest, if it is Reddit subgroup or a closed group on Facebook, you will practice your information and media literacy. If the topic is of a professional matter you also practice your communications an collaboration skills.
If you though only use social media for posting pictures of your cat, food or similar the skills you are practicing are very limited.
Image by Petrebels from Unsplash
How can we as teachers then use social media in order for our students to practice their social media skills. If we like our learners to be life long learners of our topic and to create a learning community that will remain also after they have passed our course, it is advisable to let the search for information, criticize information and share and collaborate around information and share via social media.
How to do it in practice might be challenging but for example, ask students to find a group on social media that discusses relevant topics with regards to the course work. Or let them post a question in one of these groups or on Twitter with a good set of hash tags. And then have an interesting discussion on who wrote it, why etc – you know the drill 
According to a study carried out with Indian college studens, using social media in teaching and learning in higher education actually has an impact, “(…), interactivity with teachers, peers, and online knowledge sharing behaviour has seen a significant impact on students’ engagement which consequently has a significant impact on students’ academic performance.” (Ansari & Khan, 202).
According to the video by David White students usually have a quite empty resident/insitutional quadrant. To get students to use social media in a sensible way in their studies the get prepared for their working life, where in many working places they need to be very active inte the resident/institutional quadrant to be able to manage their work. So not only do we practice content but also generic skills among our students when including social media in the teaching landscape.
(I had to look it up if there is any subgroups relevant for our PBL groups teachers’ subjects. On Reddit I found r/chemists “chemists and those who love chemistry” and r/linguistics “**lin⋅guis⋅tics**: the scientific study of human *language* * what form does it take? * how is meaning constructed? * how is it structured? * how is it produced?” f.e)
Literature list:
Ansari, J.A.N., Khan, N.A. Exploring the role of social media in collaborative learning the new domain of learning. Smart Learn. Environ. 7, 9 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-020-00118-7
David White: Visitors and residents – Credibility (part 2)
