Ethical issues raised by use of Social Media in education
The new topic we have been given is about social media, how it can be used for educational purposes and what ethical issues may arise from that. For those that does not know exactly what social media is, here is a definition from Oxford dictionaries:
“ Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking“
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some classic examples of social medias, but there are so many of them you can use for so many different purposes. Social media are basically a digital/online platform where you can share images, text, your thoughts and opinion with friends, family, classmates or the public.
Some countries are still struggling to make primary education available for their people, whilst the industrial countries are creating more and more advanced systems for learning and education, such as integrating social media in education. For us, that is really great in order to keep up with the fast developing world. But…
How exactly, is, social media used in education?
First of all, we are integrating social media to our education for employability reasons, as mentioned in my previous post about employability. We are creating relationships with employers and the industry to make a name for ourselves out there to make it easier for us to get that competitive edge in the competitive job market we have today. Here is a list over how social media can be used for educational purpose:
– Taking part in online conferences/seminars (read about this here)
– Ease of sharing and collecting useful information
– Allow students to discuss a lot of areas that is really good for learning
I mentioned how good discussions are for learning purposes. In my module “Living and working on the web” at university, we use social media and blogging as our main learning platform and it is really useful! Our assignments (like this one) can be accessed by all of us students, and we can create discussions about the topics on our blogs that allows us to reflect more on the topic and expand our knowledge of the topic, as we hear each other’s opinions. Discussions really allow students to reflect on things you might not even have considered before!
And what ethical issues do this raise?
Social Media raises a lot of questions about what is ethical and what is not. In Eldar Alasgarov’s blog post he mentioned a teacher being fired for her facebook profile picture. Another ethical question I have heard a lot about is wether or not a teacher is allowed to be friends with his or her students on facebook for an example. Most of the social media platforms have different norms thus the right and wrong about these ethical questions changes. Some would say it’s appropriate to connect with your students on LinkedIn, but not befriend them on facebook. The main reason for this to be ok and not on facebook I can imagine being that LinkedIn is seen as a professional social media whilst facebook is being seen as a really personal social media. Social Media enables information to be really easily and really quickly shared with a really large audience, which arises the ethical questions about copyright, privacy, and security, which has been covered in my blog post for topic 2.
To conclude; Social Media in education, – is it good or bad?
In my opinion all of this is great! Most people now a days are connected to the internet, but still not everyone are, which I think creates sort of a bigger gap between those who is not social media users and those who are. Social Media for us really allows us to create our own brand image online, getting insight into industries and creating our networks. As well as all of this, it allows us to reflect further after collecting additional information and thoughts from other (especially in this module).
