Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future

by Christine Greenhow (editor)

Leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the future of education, including social media usage, new norms of knowledge, privacy, copyright, and MOOCs.

How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn, and the very foundations of education? What controversies surround the integration of social media in students' lives? The past decade has brought increased access to new media, and with this new opportunities and challenges for education. In this book, leading scholars from education, law, communications, sociology, and cultural studies explore the digital transformation now taking place in a variety of educational contexts. The contributors examine such topics as social media usage in schools, online youth communities, and distance learning in developing countries; the disruption of existing educational models of how knowledge is created and shared; privacy; accreditation; and the tension between the new ease of sharing and copyright laws. Case studies examine teaching media in K–12 schools and at universities; tuition-free, open education powered by social media, as practiced by the University of the People; new financial models for higher education; the benefits and challenges of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses); social media and teacher education; and the civic and individual advantages of teens' participatory play.

Contributors
Colin Agur, Jack M. Balkin, Valerie Belair-Gagnon, danah boyd, Nicholas Bramble, David Buckingham, Chris Dede, Benjamin Gleason, Christine Greenhow, Daniel J. H. Greenwood, Jiahang Li, Yite John Lu, Minhtuyen Mai, John Palfrey, Ri Pierce-Grove, Adam Poppe, Shai Reshef, Julia Sonnevend, Mark Warschauer

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2016

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is addressing a clear node of change, challenge and controversy. The challenges of regulation are explored, alongside differentiated learning for diverse disciplines.

The absence is a key one, particularly post-Brexit and Trump. Social media is a peer-to-peer, amateur series of platforms. That is fine - except that education, teaching and learning are based on expertise. Therefore - the flattening of learning through social media - that I described as 'the Google effect' is not a benevolent force in education.

[Laura Trujillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but not great..

The book has important information about the digital era but, there are a lot of references and introductions and conclusions that are repetitive.