Connected Learning

Is Social Media really destroying our Social Skills or giving us new more effective ways of communicating and expressing ourselves?

The headlines are legion, the sentiment, widespread: “Why Social Media is Destroying Our Social Skills” (USA Today). “Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Insidious Negative Effects” (MIT Technology Review).

The rise of social media, many fear, is ruining authentic interpersonal relationships. No amount of social media, we are repeatedly told, can ever equal face-to-face interaction.

Social networking has altered our very vocabulary.  And it’s not just a matter of “tweets.” Consider such words as “like” or “follower” or “network” or “hashtag” or “endorsements” or the verb “friend.”

Face-to-face interaction, long upheld as the gold standard of social connection, has increasingly been supplanted by social media as the dominant way that the young interact and communicate and develop social competencies.

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Professors’ Place in the Classroom Is Shifting to the Side

Professors have long made assumptions about their place in the classroom.

They have seen themselves as the experts whose job is to transmit a body of knowledge, typically through a lecture. Students are there to absorb content. If they fail, it’s their fault.

The lecture hall expresses that dynamic physically. Seats—sometimes hundreds of them—are arranged in raked rows facing a spot for the professor who, like the featured act in a show, is the only one in the room doing anything worth paying attention to. After years of exhortations for faculty members to become guides on the side instead of sages on stage, those assumptions are shifting, and they carry consequences that could be significant for professors and students.

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Prompts to Help Students Reflect on How They Approach Learning

One of the best gifts teachers can give students are the experiences that open their eyes to themselves as learners. Most students don’t think much about how they learn. Mine used to struggle to write a paragraph describing the study approaches they planned to use in my communication courses. However, to be fair, I’m not sure I had a lot of insights about my learning when I was a student. Did you?

As fall courses start to wind down, it’s an apt time for reflection. Here are some pithy (I hope) prompts that might motivate students to consider their beliefs about learning. The prompts ask about learning in a larger, more integrated sense, and also challenge students to analyze the effectiveness of their approach to learning.

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