UOSM2008 Reflective Summary -Topic 4

This week’s blog topic considered the ethical issues surrounding business and educational use of social media. My blog focussed on the ethical problems of access to the educational opportunities on the web in particular; I also discussed the positive and negative ethical implications of having a voice through social media in regard to business and education. Both Caroline and Francesca commented that focussing on access issues was an interesting and different perspective. Caroline additionally introduced a helpful article which furthered the ideas in my blog by showing a small amount of the population in developing countries account for a massive amount of online activity –social media is mentioned particularly.

Francesca’s comment made reference to her own blog in which she explores the benefits of social media used in education more thoroughly than myself. I also found her work to support my own ideas, emphasising the positive impact of social media use for education makes the disadvantage of access issues to the web more prominent.

I particularly liked her references Devaney’s (2014) guide for teachers interacting with pupils on the web as they seemed sensible, ethical precautions to take in order to maintain a professional relationship, opposed to personal. There seemed to be some consensus of this idea for both business and educational social media use; Jazz and Alysia proposed likewise but in a business use context, a risk assessment for social media to provide some basic principles to bear in mind in the fast paced social media environment.

Francesca felt the biggest challenge using social media in education is unsupervised use with lower age groups. I also had a twitter conversation about this with Laura and Alysia, we acknowledged that the ‘suggested’ age for social media use by sites such as Twitter and Facebook is 13 but it is widely known to not be strictly enforced. Jazz’s blog also introduced me to the idea that social media reviews are often be falsified by the companies which I agree is unethical. Both of these are ideas I hadn’t considered myself initially.

I also had an interesting Twitter conversation; this was sparked by Rebecca mentioning Facebook’s recent purchase of oculus VR. I raised the ethical question of Oculus using the social media site ‘kickstart’ to originally gain funds for the project idea which it then sold at massive profit. Alex posed another interesting question of ethics from this story, that Facebook may have too much power in the social media and technology market.

An interesting story came to light later in the week related to this, and also relates to web access issues mentioned in my blog. Facebook announced a plan to use solar-powered drones will deliver net access to remote places. Last year Google announced similar plans to develop solar-powered balloons to deliver net access to remote areas of the world. This business use raises concerns for governments as their nation’s communications rest on an outside provider, is this vulnerability ethical? Are these companies truly being altruistic or just looking to expand their own markets to increase profit?

It’s interesting how this week’s topic has lead me to increasingly consider the ethical issues behind the recent articles; I’ve gained more awareness of ethical issues surrounding social media from this topic. Peer interaction has also been very beneficial this week as it has introducing me to new ideas and initiated discussions -on blogs and Twitter.