If Not Us, Who? Social Media Policy and the Ischool Classroom.
2014; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2328-2967
AutoresLisa P. Nathan, Alice MacGougan, Elizabeth Shaffer,
Tópico(s)Web and Library Services
ResumoIntroductionIf not now, when? If not us, who?(George Romney, 1963)1Through this article we argue that iSchools across the globe should develop policy frameworks and guidance for addressing the use of social media tools in post-secondary classrooms. iSchool educators are keenly aware of the vibrant, complicated interactions that develop between people, information and technology (Dillon, 2012). These interactions are particularly complicated when individuals are engaged in social media activities that are closely linked to course requirements and evaluations of academic performance. iSchool faculty members are uniquely positioned to identify and investigate the opportunities and challenges associated with the use of public, profit-driven proprietary platforms for educational purposes. In turn, iSchool administrators and curriculum committees are poised to incorporate findings from their colleagues' work into the proactive and iterative design of information policy that informs effective pedagogical practice and supports the ethicallyresponsive use of social media. We report on initial steps towards this goal, a series of interwoven investigations informing the development of an adaptive social media policy for our school.Many stakeholders are involved in the provision of post-secondary education. We chose to frame our inquiries around three primary stakeholders: the educator, the student and the administrator because pedagogical policies have the greatest impact on their day-to-day lives. For the educator, we focus on contemporary research from the Learning Sciences concerning social media use for pedagogical purposes; for the student we gathered students' insights on how they negotiate social media requirements set by instructors; and for administrators we analyzed the institutional policies of top-tier programs, looking for those that address the classroom use of social media.We begin with a description of the motivation for the project and segue into a review of learning sciences research on the use of social media tools in post-secondary education. We argue that educators interested in improving their pedagogical use of social media need to be well-informed on this scholarship. We then present findings from a survey of continuing students across our school's four graduate-level programs, to develop an idea of how they believe social media is contributing (or not) to their learning when no school-wide policy exists. Next we introduce the reader to our third exploration-an analysis of publicly accessible online social media policies from North American universities that have highlyranked library and information science graduate programs that are members of the iSchool caucus. Drawing on the three investigations we discuss the development of an adaptive policy statement, Social Media in the Classroom, that we drafted for faculty discussion and feedback at our school. Although the specifics of the policy remain under review, we describe the core components for readers of this submission to discuss, appropriate, trial and adapt. We present next steps in terms of introducing and implementing the social media policy across our school. Finally, we call on the iSchool/LIS education community to continue to develop, share and research iterative policy models that engage the ever-changing affordances of social media technologies and the tensions these proprietary tools create in the post-secondary educational environment.Situational MotivationIn early November 2012, a request was posted to the Association for Internet Researchers listserv concerning social media policies in educational contexts (Kruse, 2012). The scholar who posted the message stated that she had volunteered to draft an ethics document for her department and she needed to address whether it was acceptable to require students to have (or use) an online presence on a social media site as a part of their coursework (Kruse, 2012). …
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