At the University of Liecester, Senior Lecturer Dr. Alan Cann uses social media to provide a forum for “discussion and feedback” from his students.

“Social networking utilised by academic to improve student satisfaction” discusses the positive response his students have given to the system, powered by the social aggregator site FriendFeed. Because FriendFeed allows a personalized homepage, it can act as a virtual portfolio, “storing all of their posts, forming reflection on what they are doing and explanations of what they do not understand.” Cann adds that it differs from the interaction that the students have on Facebook – the students are extremely social but “very professional.”

Even microblogging social sites have their place in academia. Chris Kobayashi, an English teacher at the University of Northern Colorado, decided to fully integrate Twitter into this curriculum by having his students tweet their progress on an upcoming research paper. “Social media sites like Twitter are finding new fans in academia” describes an entire class run through Twitter, with Kobayashi having students respond his Twitter questions via the site. When his e-mail account crashed one day, he used Twitter to communicate with the students.

Much like Facebook and Twitter’s use in the marketing world, the social media platform allows for a dialogue between a source of information (in this case, a teacher or lesson plan) and a group of users (students). This open discussion can now be fostered outside of the classroom in a medium that many college students are already quite familiar with.

Dr. Cann, using the ‘feed forward’ model, is making academics more accessible and allowing students to give easy and direct feedback through social networks. Kobayashi, too is harnessing the power of real-time interaction. Will we see a revolution in how changes, both academic and administrative, come about? Through social media it is quite possible.

The SSN Take: Integrating a social platform can go beyond the marketing and business realm.

Samuel Hartman, April 23, 2010

Note: Post not sponsored.