Norm Friesen

Education and the social web promise or peril

[slideshare id=7212339&doc=educationandthesocialwebpromiseorperil-110309212837-phpapp01]

Slidecast from a recent presentation at the University of Edinburgh; developed with Shannon Lowe of my research centre. Abstract: Facebook and other social media have been hailed as delivering the promise of a new socially engaged education learning and educational experiences for undergraduate, self-directed and other sectors. A theoretical and historical analysis of these media in the light of earlier media transformations however puts this into question. Specifically, the analysis provided here questions whether social media platforms satisfy a crucial component of learning – fostering the capacity for debate and disagreement. Using mMedia theorist Raymond William’s analytical frame that emphasisesis on advertising in his analysis of the content and form of the medium, television, allows us towe weigh the structural conditions of dominant social networking sites as constraints for learning, using his critical analytical frame(?). Williams’ critique focuses on the structural characteristics of sequence, rhythm and flow of television as a cultural form. Our critique proposes information design, architecture and above all algorithm as similar structural characteristics that apply to social networks as a different but related cultural form. We shed new light on media influencing non-commercial television content (as Williams’s terms sequence, rhythm and flow account for) by proposing that the operation of commerce in non-commercial Web 2.0 content can be correspondingly accounted for by informational design, architecture and algorithm. Illustrating the ongoing salience of media theory for researchstudying on-line learning, the article updates Williams work while leveraging it in a critical discussion of the suitability of some social media for education.

At the up-coming Digital Future of Higher Ed. Conference (Feb. 22, 2011), I’ll be debating PowerPoint slides that attempt to reconstruct the main arguments for the Net Generation as a “force” in educational change. I’ve also been working on a chapter on critical theory as a methodologythat focuses specifically a critique of the “e-learning myth” of the Net Generation. (It also looks at the “myths” of the knowledge economy and the technologically-driven change in education.)

Most important, you can see the debate and the whole conference streamed LIVE from 12:00 EST on Tuesday.

ARTICLE ABSTRACT: In recent years, new socially-oriented Web technologies have been portrayed as placing the learner at the centre of networks of knowledge and expertise, potentially leading to new forms of learning and education. In this paper, I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users (“eyeballs”) with advertisers; it is not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these networks. Looking first at Facebook, Twitter, Digg and similar services, I argue their business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use. I also argue more generally that the predominant “culture” and corresponding types of content on services like those provided Google similarly privileges advertising interests at the expense of users. Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.  [View the entire article]