One step beyond

Earlier today on Twitter I said: 'To use any social media to its full potential in education you must venture beyond the classroom.' And I meant it. To achieve its optimum effect, the use of any social media - whether it be blogging, wikis or any other form of sharing of content - must breach the walls of the traditional learning space. Social media are time and space independent. They do not operate within, or rely upon, traditional ways of learning. Nor do they exist within a single timeframe. We need to see them in this context, not just as software and content on a computer screen, but as a gateway to a huge network of connections in an ever expanding global community. Facebook isn't just about friends and family anymore. It's about friends of friends, and connections to groups and online communities.

The ability to transcend the boundaries of the classroom is absolutely one of the best affordances social media provide. I have written in the past about opening up classrooms, not just the doors, to let others see what is happening and celebrate - but to let others in to the experience when they would previously have had no chance of sharing the joy of learning with you and your students. I wrote that open classrooms should also let your students out - to communicate, collaborate, and create together with other students across the globe. Traditional learning has never been that successful at achieving this, no matter how many exchange visits or pen pal schemes were instigated. Now we have the chance to take our classrooms out into the world on a global scale, never before possible.

The use of blogging, as several schools (primary/elementary and seconday/highschool) are already discovering, has the powerful potential to expand and extend students' experiences to a new level of enrichment, where interaction with students in other countries, or even just around the corner in the same city, are paying huge dividends. When they receive comments back from their peers, young bloggers are spurred on to write and create more and at a higher level of quality and achievement than ever before. It's a very powerful motivator.

The use of GPS in smartphones, working in concert with geo-specific social media such as Foursquare; the context aware systems now being introduced into museums and art galleries; QR tags and magic symbols; the Augmented Reality applications that are now proliferating - all of these and more are now avialable for teachers to exploit. We are merely limited to our own imaginations.

So what are we waiting for? Child safety and protection issues are always at the forefront of teachers' minds when they plan for blogging or other social media based learning activities. Health and safety, risk assessments for those venturing outside the coziness and 'safety' of the traditional classroom. All of these have to be considered, but if we make them an excuse for not being adventurous, we will miss the boat. Ask the outdoor schooling movement for their views on this. Let's set the kids free.

Image source by Paul Tomlin

One step beyond by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.