That education and social media will share borders and encroach on each other’s area of influence shouldn’t come as a surprise. On one hand, education as we know it is very much a social engagement in itself, involving teachers(the channels of new cognitive experiences) and students (the learner of new or restructured knowledge). On the other hand, social media is both a technological tool for communicating different ideas as well as an enriched environment for collaboration. As such, the benefits that social media can deliver to contemporary education can be tremendous, indeed. In fact, it is now very easy to imagine a virtual classroom that melds the current platforms of the most innovative online universities with the powerfully engaging and personal experience of social media. How the learning dynamics will be influenced by this theoretical setup is still open to debate but it is possibility that may now have already taken root in some form or another.
In addition, some psychologists and scientists believe that taking the conventional student-teacher relationship out of the classroom can lead to dire consequences. When taken to highly informal environment of most social networks, the traditional authority of teachers can be erode to the point that classroom engagements will be among peers, not between teachers and students whose roles and expected behavior are clearly defined.
That said, the danger of social media is very real. However, merely focusing on the risks will cause us to miss its true potential as a teaching tool/environment. After all, there’s bound to be some criminally-minded people just about anywhere a substantial group of people converge, whether online or not. True, social media lends an anonymity and cloak of security to criminal elements but there are ways of circumventing, restricting or exposing schemes without altogether banning the use of social media in education. To do so would unfairly clip the tremendous benefits social media can enrich the learning experience with.
Clearly, social media-like email and the internet-has already become a staple in people’s everyday life. Furthermore, social media is already being used by some innovative teachers to enhance their student’s learning experience, even when its unanimous acceptance by educational system is still tenuous. For teachers who intend to deploy social media tools in their classes, caution and good sense are critical, however. At the very least, the right balance between effective use of social media and behavioral boundaries should be maintained as much possible. One way to do so is by creating formal social network communities or groups that does not require the teacher to “friend” or follow a student. Keeping all communications within community page will help prevent teachers and students from getting too “personal”. In fact, any other means of making communications transparent within a given group will reduce the incidence of inappropriate behavior.
As social media is here to stay, it’s just a matter of time before its powerful sharing, collaborative, and instructional tools will be formally appropriated by many forward-thinking educational institutions. After some time, social networks will become just another technology by which teachers can share knowledge with their students. Even then, the bottom line remains that it is the person using technology-not the technology itself-that is responsible for any abuse done through it. This consistent fact (as may be applied to similar communication tools such as hand written letters, telephones and emails) requires all enterprising teachers of the future to establish a social media strategy that will enable the delivery of its benefits while curtailing its potential risks.
By: Catherine E. Kabiling | Teacher I | Ipag Elementary School | Mariveles, Bataan
