We notice more and more articles appearing that talk about education and social media, like this one last week in the Washington Post about twittering professors. So, we continue this theme with a post by Ashley and Jim. Take a look.
-Jim and Shwen
Engagement as an Invaluable Education Tool: A Lesson from Social Media
Ashley Stempel’10 and Jim Stellar
There is something to be said about social media and its ability to get people to act. There are aspects to social media, like we talked about in our last post (on 6/12), that traditional media do not have. I feel like it revolves around the capacity for ownership, and the need to feel involved on a deeper level. Perhaps once people can author a blog post or respond to a news article they feel a sense of ownership to it. There are those who want to lead their own conversation, or want to discover something all on their own and then share it with the masses, making them feel important. Maybe we should consider which characteristics are important to human emotion, etc, and then see how social media address them better than traditional media. This could answer why the use of social media is on the rise.
That ownership is what I see as engagement, just like the engagement that comes from experiential education. You did three six-month cooperative education experiences that got you engaged with your career development in a way that has sparked our conversations. On the other hand, when I was in college so long ago, it was like high school without my parents. I was a good kid and did well in my major, but I never thought about the larger implications. I remained pre-med largely because I was (to reverse-quote Henry David Thoreau) “living the unexamined life.” I became engaged only when I worked in a lab my junior/senior summer and set my sights on getting into graduate school for what we refer to today as neuroscience. It is the engagement from comes from being an owner that I think matters.
An underlying theme between both media and education is the power of communication. Both media entities and the classroom create and promote an atmosphere in which the primary function is the communication of news, ideas, and other information between groups of people. But what social media and experiential education do, in comparison with traditional media and education, is add a level of engagement that empowers the individual through the ownership. Not only does the technology associated with social media expand that communication to a larger and more diverse sample of participants, but it gives people the chance to voice their opinion and let their thoughts be read. And with experiential education, not only are students learning about the world and their career path, but they actually have the chance to live it. Through social media and experiential education engagement is encouraged, if not required. Social media allows for me to have a real-time conversation on Twitter with a man in London, while experiential education permits me the chance to work in a meeting with the President of a biopharmaceutical company. Both situations require interaction from both parties, of who would typically never before link-up with one another.
So how do you see this as applying to experiential education?
Experiential education seems to have the same effect within a person as social media does on a society. Both social media and experiential education promote the fusion and ownership of ideas across some form of barrier; whether global distance, age, or status. Social media gives people the opportunity to become engaged in a conversation, and during my co-ops at Northeastern, not only was I engaged in the career conversation, learning tools that will eventually help me land a career post-graduation, but I saw myself becoming more and more engaged with the conversation about the direction of my life as a whole. I was learning from leaders and experiences, not through textbooks and lectures. I took more ownership of my future after living the experiences, rather than hearing about them from other people, just like you took ownership of your own future once working in a lab atmosphere.
The obvious goal of an experiential education program is to develop a career, but the underlying accomplishment is to truly understand, or begin to understand, yourself as a student, a friend, a professional, a son/daughter, simply (but not really so simple a task) as someone who is coexisting with the multitudes of other people in the world. The key component in experiential education is the experience. This type of learning finally acknowledges that we as human beings MUST be given the chance to develop entirely as people, internally as well as career-wise.
I totally agree about the career, and especially with the idea that the best careers are developed by developing the person. That is best done by “Educating the Whole Student” as we wrote about in an early blog post – To “educate the whole student” classical academic education must be combined with experiences. But the question again remains why. One factor could simply be the connection, as you emphasize above. Networking is always good, but there is something about the experience and the engagement that is really interesting. A recent article in Science, “On Becoming Modern” by Ruth Mace, suggested that our human history may have really blossomed once we started living in groups large enough to foster the sharing of innovations made by individuals in the group, rather than letting these progressions die out. The article also pointed out that when different groups interacted, they could have traded ideas/innovations. All of this implies that humans are built to engage with each other for the purposes of our own group (and perhaps individual) development. Although this is not a new concept, I find it powerful that it may also underlay our cultural evolution. My point is that it is the potential for a human experience that really engages, and to go back to our recent post, human experience can easily occur on social media if you think of it in a positive way. I also think that a lot of how we interact in groups involves those limbic brain areas and the logic circuits within that we have referred to here as “The Other Lobe of the Brain.”
Again, enough from us … let’s hear from you readers. Does the important part of experience as we wrote about it boil down to engagement? Is that key to why social media can be so powerful?
3 Responses to “Engagement as an Invaluable Education Tool: A Lesson from Social Media”
Dave Lee says:
You raise several very interesting concepts in your post. I like your thoughts on social media providing people a way of getting their ideas out to the world. Although I’m not sure that I agree with your equating “ownership” and “engagement.” While I agree that both ownership and engagement are motivating factors which drive peoples’ use of social media tools, they are very different motivators.
Much is made today of the interaction and conversations that are driven by social media tools. The ability to engage with other like minded people regardless of time and geography is a very powerful motivator. You can put your ideas out there, get reaction to them and revise your ideas at a pace ever imagined 10-15 years ago. (Of course, the negative side is that you can get slammed faster than ever as well.) Humans are social beings by nature. We have always loved to learn in groups and with other like minded people. Honing our ideas in academies and forums, with groups of friends, and debating those who don’t agree with us. The new technologies make this easier to do.
You also talk about the engagement motivation in experiential education. This is particularly the case because of the involvement of mentors and experts. You can try things had have people you respect react and critique your ideas and efforts.
Ownership, in my mind, is very different than engagement. (Although, you can build ownership through engagement.) An Australian research in Adult Learning named Stephen Billett views adult learning as very much a process of “creating the story of our life.” In essence we create an narrative about ourselves which we then own. Billett sees this in apprenticeship learning situations (one form of experiential learning). We own our learning as we piece together who we are. In my view, building ownership is very much an inside job.
In the early days of blogging, most of those of us who were trying out this new online tool would post and post and post and never have a single comment from our readers. To the point that if it weren’t for services that reported how many people had viewed our blogs, we would have had no clue that anyone was actually reading them. But I can tell you, I felt a real ownership to my ideas – and resultingly ownership about myself as a blogger and a person – simply from the mere fact that I was recording my thoughts. Not surprisingly, in the early days, blogs were considered to be online diaries. Although, unlike my personal journals, I hoped someone would read them, the ownership came through my giving life to my thoughts.
I think it’s funny that Twittering and Facebooking are getting blasted for being self-aggrandizing. As if talking about ourselves, getting to know who we are, letting others know who we are and getting feedback from there are somehow bad things brought on by blogs and instant messaging. Building the story of who we are and sharing it with others is what being human is all about. It’s all about learning about ourselves, others, and the world we live in so that we can improve all three.
ownership, engagement and social media « e e learning says:
[…] on my friend Jim Stellar’s blog, the other lobe, by one of his students, Ashley Stempel. in engagement as an invaluable education tool: a lesson from social media, ashley talks about ownership and engagement as motivators in learning. while i disagree with […]
Jim Stellar says:
Dave,
I think you have a point about ownership not being equal to engagement. What I think I/we meant (and that was my contribution – the blue typeface color) was that putting your ideas out there makes you own them and that creates engagement because of that expectation. It is a little like raising your hand in class and making a comment (one owns that) vs. sitting and taking notes. In the former case, one is engaged. In the later case, one might be engaged. Working on co-op also produces engagement as the student is often in a small working group that has to get stuff done and cannot just sit back and learn. I think that is what me meant to do by linking the two concepts.
What I like even more is the reverse direction you point out where one can build ownership through engagement. That is certainly true and powerful in experiential education. So maybe the right way to think about the concept is as a classic Venn diagram with two overlapping circles where sometimes things are both at once. But I would suggest that we put arrows on this diagram suggesting that each one can influence the other.
Of course, the point is that these real world factors (classroom, co-op job) about which I have just written are present in a very interesting way in social media. I also think that we older hands have to work with younger people to keep up with their take – hence Ashley’s and my June 12th post on the natural “warmth” that these media seem to have for young people. I certainly learned a lot from her in writing that piece.
Very interesting.
-Jim