Teaching with Social Media: Disrupting Present Day Public Education

Abstract

Because social technologies present illuminating educational, ethical, economic, and structural challenges to existing constructions of public education, they catalyze a fundamental examination of what public education should look like and be like in a democracy. Given their performances in other arenas, mobile and electronic technologies have the potential to further critical pedagogical praxis by enabling more democratic and participatory discursive practices. At the same time, they are significant vectors for market infiltration. They intensify surveillance, reproduce existing structures, and constrain conceptions of the possible. To examine what emerges regarding the construction of teacher as a subject when these latest technologies are incorporated, this article reports on findings from a multiple case study of five secondary school teachers using social media in their teaching.

Notes

Today multiple terms, such as digital technology, information technology (IT), and information and communication technology (ICT) are variously used in reference to the use of computer-based systems of storing, managing, creating, and sharing information. Since the turn of the century, social media and Web 2.0 technologies have been added. Throughout this article, I use the terms social technologies, social media, and social media technologies to refer to “Internet-based services and applications that are based around a mass socialisation [sic] of connectivity powered by the collective actions of online user communities” (Selwyn 2011, p. 6). Commonly, the term social media refers to popular sites like Facebook and Twitter. With this definition, many sites and applications qualify as social media or social technologies, including the learning or classroom management systems increasingly used in formal education.

This assertion is complex and, at times, contested. Critiquing the participatory potential of blogs, for example, Cammeraerts points out that markets, states, employers, political and cultural elites, intimidating fellow bloggers, and active antipublic groups “erode the participative and democratic potentials of the internet” (2008, 14). He provides two memorable examples of the unresolvable tension between the capitalist and communitarian paradigms: clogs (corporate blogs) and flogs (fake bloggers who are a surreptitious component of a company's PR strategy).