Session 1: Social media use

Introduction

Welcome to Session 1 of this free course which looks at how you can best make use of social media in your studies in Higher Education (HE). Social media has changed the ways we interact as a community – back in 2003 when the author of this course graduated, Facebook did not exist. Fast forward just ten years to 2013, Facebook had 500 million users and was one of the largest social media sites in the world. Among academic staff, there is a great deal of concern (and ignorance) about how the students we teach engage in WhatsApp, Facebook, X (previously known as Twitter) and other forms of social media. However, staff are increasingly seeing the possibilities for its use to connect students on the same module or qualification.

Here Mel Green from The Open University speaks about the value she thinks it brings to students.

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Transcript: Video 1 Why you should use social media in HE

Mel Green

By using social media as part of their higher education, I believe that students gain access to their own personal learning network. And this can be national, international, and gain access to people who they might not have ever been able to gain access to without social media. It’s a really important part of developing as a student. And as a person to have conversations and interactions with people who are in different locations, in different contexts and different experiences to yourself. And so I think it is completely invaluable to develop a social media profile. And it’s just about making sure that you are safe, that you are. conscious about how much you’re sharing and you’re aware of all the parameters and the boundaries available to you that enable you to get rid of those people that perhaps are not there for the same reasons and maybe are more toxic in their behaviours.

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Video 1 Why you should use social media in HE

Here Olivia Kelly talks about how her students gain value from Twitter.

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Transcript: Video 2 General use of Twitter by students

Olivia Kelly

My doctoral research into how students are using, higher education students are using Twitter, from the interviews that I did with students, it really showed that they, you know, they regularly talked about how they felt part of a community within Twitter, with being able to connect with other students, and that they... got motivation and they felt that they benefited from that. But alongside that, many of the students talked about how they were careful of how they used the platform. They were strategic about who they connected with, what they tweeted about, how much time they spent on the platform so that they got out of it what they needed. They decided, what do I want from this platform? And they used the tools that were available to get that from the platform and make it help them and what they needed.

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Video 2 General use of Twitter by students

Experiences of using social media vary. The first step is to consider how you use social media. So, in this, the first of four study sessions, you will reflect on your own use of social media and consider some of the ways in which social media can influence HE (higher education) experiences.

Figure 1 The first ever tweet

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Screenshot of a tweet from Jack Dorsey ‘just setting up my twttr’.

Figure 1 The first ever tweet