My NSF Cyberlearning grant was accepted! I will be exploring the use of social network sites with middle school students, to create an online community of science storytelling. Our goal is to explore how to increase young adolescents’ identification with science in their lives. Check out the projects page for more info.
Category Archives: Research
How Can We Think About Social Media and Education Policy?
The education world is scrambling to catch up with the implications of today’s ubiquitous, social media environment. We’re familiar with stories about teacher firings and cyber-bullying. The latest dustup has been the recent legislation in Missouri that forbids teachers from having any private interaction with students online. This means no friend-connections on Facebook or private messages between students and teachers. All interaction must occur publicly. Of course, there’s been huge push-back and uproar to this shortsighted policy and many such controversies are sure to come in the education world as we deal with new media. But how can we as education leaders think about these policy issues?
Students, SNSs, and Social Capital
My first year as an Assistant Professor has been a whirlwind; moving to a new place, adjusting to a new institution, and finding my way. Luckily I’ve had a tremendous amount of data from my dissertation to keep me occupied on the research front. My dissertation consisted of an experimental study of the effects of using a social network site in high school classrooms. I’m in the process of preparing a manuscript for review in a journal, but I thought I’d share some of the results.
Interestingly, the SNS used in the high schools I worked with had a slightly negative effect on how connect the students felt to their peers in school. However, I also surveyed the students on their use of other popular sites like Facebook and Myspace. The result? Students who actively used other SNSs reported much higher connection to their peers in school. What does this mean for educators? I think there are positive and unexplored possibilities of using social media tools to better engage students to their school community. This type of engagement is not about learning specific content… but being connected, or having more social capital, is often related to positive outcomes in school such as students persisting to graduation and achieving higher. Could we use SNSs to better connect young people to school?
Social Network Sites and Youth: Paper Published in JASIST
I recently had a paper accepted and published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). The article appears in their Advances in Information Sciences series, and is a review of the critical questions that surround youths participation in social network sites. How do they use them? What are the hypothesized effects on youth relationships, psychological well-being, and learning? These are some of the issues I consider in the article. You can find the article here, or feel free to contact me and I would be happy to share the article with you.