Social Media in Education

Social media has a great deal of potential for education. Ever since the advent of social communities and collaboration in education technology, such as the pioneering PLATO Learning System, powerful tools have been developed that enable learners to collaborate on documents, share thoughts, obtain feedback on questions or ideas, and to be able to interact with their peers and instructors outside of the traditional classroom time and space. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights some of the recent methodologies and research regarding the uses of social networks in learning.

However, while social media tools, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be very useful for the learning process, they are not without their downsides.
Recently, New York City's Education Department, which does recognize the educational benefits of social media, released a list of guidelines that limit the interaction between teachers and students on social media in response to a number of cases of inappropriate behavior between educators and their pupils. Students also need to be wary of the content they post of social media sites, which, once public, can provide further insight into a student's character with serious repercussions for his or her academic career. For instance, The Chronicle of Higher Education also published an article detailing how some college scholarship providers peruse applicant's social media posts as another deciding factor (a similar situation is delightfully parodied in a video by the Onion).

To overcome the downsides inherent in public social media services, and to capitalize on social media's educational benefits, one solution for educators are private social media networks. Companies, such as Edmodo and Teamie, offer educational institutions the ability to create private social networks, groups, and classrooms that enable students, teachers, parents, and administrators the opportunity to network, collaborate, and interact in a closed secure enviornment. There are now online tools availabe for educators to make full use of the learning capabilities of social media and networks, without the potential for abuse.