There are a variety of different social media outlets in which teachers and students can explore different social learning outcomes. Each has different advantages, and provide different ways in which people can share multimodal digital texts.
Wikis
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Social media, and online writing are an amazing platform for both teachers and students to educate, solve problems, interact, and assess knowledge. Through websites like wikis, teachers are able to post information for students, see creative design projects that students have created, and assess and provide support and feedback for learners.
Cope et al. (2011) propose that "teachers and students are increasingly using Web-based writing portfolio spaces such as Wikispaces, PBWiki, WordPress, and Google Apps. These spaces become living, Web-accessible, and assessable records of learning tasks that students have undertaken (Cope, Kalantzis, McCarthey, Vojak, & Kline, 2011, p. 80). |
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Vasudevan et al, (2013), describe Twitter as “a microblogging platform that challenges the user to condense his or her thoughts into 140-character messages called tweets that, when published, appear automatically in the newsfeeds of those who have subscribed to—or follow—the user’s channel” (Vasudevan et al, 2013, p455).
Twitter is an excellent example of a platform that promotes the idea that literacy is social (Scribner, 1984). Through the act of tweeting, students are able to engage with multiliteracies, and traditional text, by attaching photos, images, links, and videos. Through the audience of online members, students are able to create and build their identities, further engaging them in 21st century literacy practice. |
There are a variety of other social networking tools such as snapchat and instagram, however their is little research on their effectiveness in education thus far, although this is likely because they are newer platforms. Any mode that students are engaged in, that is multimodal would be an asset to future multiliteracies pedagogy.
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Facebook is a popular online social networking platform where students disseminate information through a variety of modes. When considering digital texts, Street et al. (2010) analyzes Facebook in order to “see a merging of materiality and modal compositions through photographs and signage, with communities, cultural practices, and everyday life through rituals such as adding comments to your wall space. Using cultural practices like uploading images to complement texts…[these] represent concrete examples of merging semiosis with social practice” (p. 2000). Through the mass of modalities shared on Facebook, it proves to be an excellent tool for future multiliteracies practice.
Like any tool however, educators need to make sure that they monitor and create meaningful learning opportunities, in order for the platform to be a successful educational tool. As facebook is an online sharing environment, Selwyn (2009) suggests that “Facebook appears to provide a ready space where the ‘role conflict’ that students often experience in their relationships with…teaching staff, academic conventions and expectations can be worked through in a relatively closed ‘backstage’ area (p. 157). |