This week I was at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies conference. New tools, programs, and methods for teaching on social media were everywhere. I also heard stories of courses that used Facebook or Twitter being shut down left and right. One even at the school that I work at.

To honest, I am not comfortable telling instructors that they can’t teach with Facebook or Twitter. I feel that if we say something like that as a school or university, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We say that we want to teach students how to be life-long learners. We say that we want them to keep learning after the course is over. But then to say that they can’t learn in one of the largest websites in the world? How is that teaching them to be life long learners that should be constantly learning where ever they go?

Of course, if I were to talk to instructors about how they use Facebook or Twitter, I am sure most of the time I could come up with a dozen other tools or systems to use that would be as good as or better for the learning objectives they are shooting for. One of the reason I like the idea of heutagogy is that the focus is on teaching learners how to learn, not what to learn. So you don’t go to Facebook as just another outlet for the instructor to pass along what you are supposed to learn (like they would on Blackboard or email or other tools). You would use Facebook as one of the tools that help you network with experts that can help you learn what you want to learn or can connect you with others that can help.

At Sloan-C, Twitter was most definitely the tool de jour. I remember just five years ago trying to bring Twitter hashtags and back channel to a conference that I was the CIO for. The resistance was crazy. People hated the idea of encouraging people to Tweet during sessions. They should pay attention! And then to have a certain tag for each session? How dare we let possible critique out into the open! We can’t let anyone know there are people that aren’t happy.

Now, of course, all of those things are normal. I think that between the CECS 6100 use of social media and the Sloan-C use of Twitter, I gained dozens of Twitter connections in just a few weeks…. but almost no Facebook connections. Not sure why, but people still treat Facebook as a system that is a bit more private that Twitter. Or maybe my Facebook settings made it too difficult for people to find me.

I think the question of whether social media should be used in education really comes down to… shocking…. design. If you want to use it for strategic communicative actions, then there are probably other tools that work better. Of course, currently you can have other tools auto-post content to Twitter or Facebook, so in some ways you could use it as a mirror to reflect strategic communications to learners in whatever form they choose, but those would still point back to basic empirical transfer of information from teacher to learner. Probably the best way to use social media in learning is for constative communicative actions. People are getting used to arguing on Facebook and Twitter already, so why not try to teach them to do so in a respectful, academic manner? The trouble is that any social media system will have limitations that would have to be considered in design. Twitter has the 140 character limit and rarely gives you good context for replies. This could be frustrating for learners, but also a good exercise in creating short, understandable points. If a person can’t understand what you were replying to or what you are saying, then you need to re-think your response. Facebook allows longer, more robust responses – but these responses are often displayed out of order. And when even when displayed in order, the lack of threads can make it difficult to know who is responding to who. So, again, the constative communication would require that learners make their responses clear. Other tools, such as Flickr, Blogs, YouTube, etc would be better suited for dramaturgical communicative actions – but the design of the lessons surrounding these would need to be flexible enough to allow students to express themselves in a manner they feel is best. That is why I like the idea of assignment banks – allow students to choose what tools they use to prove that they have achieved the learning goals. This also means the instructor has to release some control of the course design in order to achieve this level of learner-centeredness.

Ultimately, I think that control is one of the biggest barriers in using social media effectively in learning. If you are just using social media to extend the control over your class into other corners of the Internet, then students will probably not be interested in it. If you are using it to release some of the control and allow students to become participants in a more social constructivist paradigm, then you might be on to something. After all, there is a reason these tools are called social media. They don’t really work any differently than any other tool if you use them for broadcasting content. Blackboard works as well Facebook or many, many other tools in that regard. To truly use these tools to their full potential, an instructor would have to embrace the paradigm behind them.

However, this might be very difficult for instructors or even administrators who are used to more controlled, behaviorist environments. So in some ways I understand why there are certain people going around saying that you can’t use social media tools in education. They believe in an orderly transfer of knowledge from expert to learner, and therefore think that every tool must work the same. But on the other hand, you have some ultra-constructivist instructors that just jump in and let chaos reign with no real idea what to do. Therefore, I think the best use of social media is to either 1) teach students how to use the tools as one way to connect with others and become life-long learners, or 2) use the tools in a learner-centered social manner that allows the learners to have a good deal of control over the experience.