Being a student in either Communication Science or Social Sciences at the UvA means that you are bound to come across one of the following tasks within your courses. Either you'll be expected to contribute to a blog, to update your knowledge about a certain subject onto a wiki or at least mingle in a discussion online. Maybe you'll be in a community-site. These are all things being done already.
As soon as a student finishes a task, he will log out from the wiki/blog/forum and log on to his Facebook and start being social.
My guess is that there are two identities of a student. There's a student on duty and a student off duty. Once a student's off duty, courses that use social media sites aren't being read or contributed to.
So... should HEI's (Higher Education Insitutions) go and try to infiltrate in the off-duty-student-life? Will they even be able to succeed? Should students be on-duty 24/7?
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Good question! I expect the 'off-duty' and 'on-duty' time within online social networks gets more diffuse as students progress in their studies, or correlates to the level of how active/involved they are in their field of study.
ReplyDeleteSocial networks are the most effective way to filter through information overload. For students who are active in their field of study, outside of the classroom; online interaction is an option to dive deeper into the topic(s). Of course there are other options, face-to-face options. And just as these (student associations, symposia, etc) are stimulated by the university, I think online social networking initiatives should also be facilitated by the university.
Also, implementing social media tools in the curriculum gives students an opportunity to train their online competences, which they can benefit from in their studies as well as later in their careers.
Using online social media tools to interact with students is just the university approaching students on their own turf, using media they are using already, or training them to use media which they can benefit from in their careers. Students use email for social and academic purposes, why not other tools? If universities use social media tools to interact with their students, are they invading their off-duty time? No, I think the on-duty time will slowly take place more often in social media platforms.
Some instances of merging off and on-duty activity which I see:
- A student befriends fellow students after meeting them in class. Maybe makes status updates on classwork s/he is doing. They may get suggestions, help, comments on that classwork from those friends… is that on-duty of off-duty?
- An active social sciences student may be involved in online discussions or social networks on social and political matters, completely independent of the courses s/he is following. Is that on or off duty?
- A student doing an internship abroad, writing his/her experiences in a blog, communicating the blog address to his/her intern coordinator or mentor as wel as family… on or off?
Again, good question!