This week I had the opportunity to read an interesting article posted on educause.edu and written by Susan Mehringer. The article outlined some very important facets of social media literacy that I have not ever encountered before. In fact, I have never really seen anyone attempt to break down social media literacy into its constituents. I find this task a bold undertaking since social media is ever changing and that by the time a person would be done researching and organizing necessary info, the entire platform could have changed already; a common aspect of any digital tool. In Mehringer's article, the outlined facets are attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. She puts particular emphasize that attention is the fundamental aspect with an interconnected web of the other 4 being used without any possible specific use of one in isolation.
Attention:
Mehringer brings up many great points when it comes to student attention in classes where laptops are permitted. Her main idea though is not to ban social media and online distractions from the class but to make students aware of where their attention is being directed. She performs a few probing social experiments on the students to accomplish this. Her end goal is to allow students to gain some perspective of what it means to connect to their public voice and the implications of doing so. She emphasizes that the focused attention should be place on what they are saying with consideration of others i.e. information outside our focal area.
Participation:
Mehringer states that we must participate in a way that is valuable to others and become active digital citizens. Technology is a "...powerful engine of participation." Today's social platforms allows people to inform, persuade, and influence the beliefs of others through active participation. The power of which grows with the ability to organize large groups of people.
Collaboration:
With social media, people can collaborate in ways that were too difficult and costly before. The benefits of the power for social medias ability to rally large groups quickly can be seen around the world in influencing political policy and spending, to helping disaster victims.
Network Awareness:
Social networks are essential to human well-being and before the advent of online social networks, there were physical limitations on the amount of people that could be included. Now, network sizes are exponential in size, with limitations being what we choose them to be. Educators and learners understand two key notions in terms when deciding who to include in their personal learning networks (PLN), reputation and diffuse reciprocity. Essentially, they base their PLN on if a person is trustworthy or entertaining, or that they will contribute in turn with each other, useful information.
Critical Consumption:
Critical consumption is the "crap detector" which involves who and what is trustworthy. In order to determine who is trustworthy, we must "Consult them personally, consult what they've written, ad consult their opinion about the subject." If they seem trustworthy afterwards, then we add them to our PLN. This crap detection is largely connected to attention. We must develop strong skills on how to focus our attention on people and information that is useful to us amidst the immense flow of information online.
I'll leave this post with one final quote that Mehringer, "... if we want to discover how we can engage students as well as ourselves in the 21st century, we must move beyond skills and technologies. We must explore also the interconnected social media literacies of attention, participation, cooperation, network awareness, and critical consumption."
Hey Joe,
ReplyDeleteGreat post, really is an intensive look into social media. The point that stood out to me is the attention bit. I find this in my own life, with social media and just technology in general. In my free time I very rarely just devote my attention to one thing. I am often doing some combination of watching TV, being on my phone, and using my laptop. I really notice this when I watch sports with my Dad, he often asks if I am even watching. Although he is guilty of it sometimes as well when he gets on his tablet. I really do not think that having our attention split between all these different things is good for us. Especially me as I am horrible at multitasking. I try to make a conscious effort to devote my attention to one thing at a time but it is difficult when there are that many forms of social media and information at your finger tips.
I have found these same attention problems in schools as well. At my last placement each student in the school had their own personnel device to use in the classroom. The majority of which were I pads. I got asking the students how it worked cause they were owned by the school but they had them at all times and took them home each day. The students all said they used their personal apple id's which means they had all the conveniences of their cell phone right there on their i pad. All of their messaging, apps, games and social media on the device they were suppose to be doing school work on. One class had a great big i message group chat. I'd be using the group chat to my advantage for discussion purposes, but that was not how the students used it. It seems pretty generally accepting in schools that we do not want student playing on their phones, so why would we give them i pads capable of all the same things. These devices are distracting for the average student, imagine a student with an attention disorder. I think that there is tremendous value and potential to all students having their own devices but we need to be able to control how they are used. I also think that there still needs to be that time where we put down the devices and get that face to face human interaction.