Social Media in HigherEd

 After spending some time exploring Hypothes, which I am still excited about, I decided to read the article from Gülbahar , Rapp , Kilis , and Sitnikova on social media use in higher education for EME6414. The authors of this article explore the acceptance of social media within a higher education setting both among students and among faculty.  Interestingly, although the authors found that students approved of using social media in the classroom, and faculty indicated that there were clear benefits to using social media even over the university's LMS, there had not been widespread use of social media in higher education practice. 

I found it interesting that although few professors utilized this for their courses they did mention that they used social media platforms for their own personal research and learning often. In response to the lack of knowledge regarding social media, or better yet the lack of awareness of how to use this in a Higher Ed classroom, the authors worked to develop a tool kit for faculty on this matter called the Social Media Toolkit.

The tool has two main features that can be used by faculty to help with the use of social media in the classroom. First, there is a handy algorithm that determines what features would best be suited to recommend to the faculty and second,  it provides additional guidelines and suggestions on how best to use that technology to match the needs of the instructor who is doing the survey.

I find that this would be particularly helpful especially in light of some of the things that I read earlier in the course regarding some of the barriers to use of social media, and technology generally among instructors in the K-12 level, although I'm sure it would likely apply at the Higher Education level also. That barrier being that many on instructors felt that they did not understand the technology well enough themselves to be able to recommend its use among students. 

I especially liked the idea of a "task-technology fit" when designing this tool. It seems that the most important aspect of this is to make sure that you are not just promoting social media generally, but instead responding to the specific needs of an instructor in the moment. I think this will be one of the most useful features of the tool in encouraging instructors to use it since they will be searching for an idea to solve a specific problem that they have or improve some aspect of their instruction.