The role of social media as a learning environment in the fully functioning university: preparing for Generation Z

What is the role of social media in the fully functioning university? Asking questions about the role of social media is of interest for at least three reasons: social media has rapidly become ubiquitous, with a significant proportion of humanity making use of it. Considered as an innovation using Roger’s stage model, social media is now being adopted by laggards (Rogers, 1962). This widespread adoption is especially marked among those who go to university: both as a student and as Faculty.

Secondly, as an innovation, attitudes towards Social media have matured as a technology innovation has moved through the Gartner Hype Cycle; at least as far as the slough of despond (the lowest point on their non-circular cycle). Many commentators have moved from the optimistic early hopes about the enabling power of Twitter and Facebook, for example in the so called “Arab Spring”. Instead recent analysis are more likely to draw on the revelations of Edward Snowden and scandalous misuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica to characterise the impact of social media in terms of harvesting users’ attention (Wu, 2017), or even of imposing the shackles of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015).

A third reason to ask questions of social media now is the changing attitude and use by many of those entering higher education as students. There is a growing body of evidence that among those born since the late nineties, often characterised as Generation Z, are different in their use of social media to the millennials who preceded them. There is an ambivalence towards the normative pressures of publicly sharing information, and a recognition of the related increasing likelihood of mental health problems, depression and negative body image (Dhir, Yossatorn, Kaur, & Chen, 2018). There is also anxiety about the prospects for future wellbeing: among Generation Z students this may be related to concern with grades and degree categories, and how these relate to life chances such as well paid, stable employment (Iqbal, 2018). These anxieties show in the increased number of Generation Z who will not share information publically on social media. The popularity of ephemeral Snapchat and Whatapp groups is indicative of a greater caution.

How do these changes to the widespread, yet ambivalent adoption of social media among those just starting their higher education, relate to the roles of social media in a fully functioning university? To address this question we need to clarify what characterises a fully functioning university. In a series of papers with colleagues, I have looked at the long patterns of the role of the university in western society (Bourner, Heath, & Rospigliosi, 2013). While not denying the important place of higher education in the ancient Islamic world, these studies have considered the university in the form it took as a tool of the Christian Church in the middle ages, when the institutions that are still known today, such as Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford, Cambridge and Heidelberg were founded. We found three distinct functions for the university in the ensuing millennium.

The first function, which characterised the period or the foundation of the early universities, was in the service of society. Europe was dominated by the Christian church and the role of the early universities was to develop clerics trained in Latin, scriptural analysis and with the administrative capabilities needed for organising and managing the people and resources of the church which, in effect, was society.

As the Renaissance and Reformation reduced the hegemony of the church, the function of the university shifted to servicing the needs of the student. The sons of the ruling classes attended university, to develop as well read and cultured gentleman, aware of “the best which has been thought and said”. While by contemporary standards this seems a patriarchal and culturally elitist perspective, it was a role for the university that held the needs of the students highest.

As the impact of industrialisation highlighted the economic and social value of scientific knowledge, the third defining function of the university became dominant: the service of the accumulation of knowledge. Starting with Wilhelm von Humboldt at the University of Berlin this relatively late dominant service has characterised universities for the last century, and still plays a central role in the contemporary university today.

These three historical functions for the university are in a dynamic tension in the contemporary university in neoliberal economies, and it against them that the performance of universities are measured. Research to fuel the knowledge economy, stimulate innovation and address the “wicked“ problems of developing a sustainable global environment with increasing expectations of material comfort for the many form the highest goals that Universities seek to address through their service of the accumulation of knowledge. At the national level these are functions of the service of the university to society: to develop national competences and competitive advantage in return for the investment of contested national taxpayer resources. The funding of higher education is largely rationalised by the universities’ functions in the service of society. But today, the fully functioning university may also recognise the student as a customer, whom the university serves. The importance placed on student satisfaction surveys, student-centred learning and employability outcomes shows that the function of the service of the needs of the student are crucial to the fully functioning university. For each of these functions of the university, there are roles that social media can play.

For the university in the service of society, the role of social media has become a widely adopted tool for engagement. The use of blogs to create rapid, responsive output and commentary, what Beer (2014) calls punk, forms a useful counterpoint to the measured and slow process of other forms of academic publishing. Even more responsive is the academic use of Twitter and Instagram to build networks and establish reputation, (Gandini, 2016). Social media for academics has provided some supplements to the established media channels for sharing their work and making their expertise of use in the world.

Similarly, for the function of the university in the service of knowledge, there are many networks of collaboration, knowledge sharing and knowledge development that are supported by social media. Mailing lists, blog networks and Twitter have become part of the established means by which transnational communities of academic practice are organised. Conference promotion and participation are greatly enhanced by social media and the real-time engagement with conference events and presentation is one of the high points of Twitter applied to collaborative online discussion.

The third function of a fully functioning university is the student-centred university, and it is in the service of the interactive learning environment where there is less clarity about how social media can play a role. While there are many studies of the pedagogic application of some social media, it is also in the area of student adoption and use that many problems arise (Hennessy, Kirkpatrick, Smith, & Border, 2016). Ambivalence and anxiety about the persistent legacy of social media engagement lead to low take-up rates on innovative learning schemes. For recent graduates, even a social platform such as Linkedin, explicitly oriented to a professional demonstration of identity online, is fraught with concerns about identity and what is appropriate to share.

It is in the function of the university as student centred, that the greatest potential for pedagogic research into roles for social media in the fully functioning university lie. While this issue of Interactive Learning Environments does not feature such research, social media is an aspect of learning environments that continues to evolve rapidly. Let us hope there are ways to help the student experience of social media gain some of the benefits that are being enjoyed by Faculty and their engagement with the service of knowledge and society.

ORCID

Pericles asher Rospigliosi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7356-9850