Rethinking the Role and Controversial Nature of Social Media in Education | W12 Q1 | Forum

I believe that three main articles of the week (Greenhow et al., 2019; Krutka et al., 2019; Ahn et. al, 2011) provided a versatile picture for me in terms of understanding even more about the role of social media in education, and the potential problems about using social media in primary and secondary education. First, as Greenhow et al. (2019) pointed out that there are number of affordances of using social media in education. Integrating social media in education plays an important role in term of a) promoting students and teacher learning, b) supporting teacher education and research (policy implication), and c) communication of scholarship. As we discussed through some other articles in the last weeks, SNSs have potential benefits to foster active learning of students and to enhance professional learning opportunities for teachers by providing additional resources and tools.

Besides these prominent positive points of social media, Krutka et al. (2019) and Ahn et al. (2011) concentrated on the counter arguments about using the social media in education. They reminded how these social media platforms are basically driven by neoliberal and profit‐motivated impulses. I believe that Krutka et al. (2019) raised a really important question for educators and policy makers to help them reconsider the scope of integrating social media in educational settings. They asked following questions “How do social media companies make money?”, “To what degree do profit motives compromise transparency, equity, health, safety, and democracy?” and, “how should educators and their students respond in the face of the moral and ethical failures of technology in society?” These questions highly resonated with me and I believe that these are the core questions that we should think about in the policy front. These points also reminded me the discussion around using AI technologies in education. Since these platforms interwoven with each other and have the same core problems, they need to be considered by teachers, teacher educators and policy makers to become a critical consumer of these platforms and to educate students who can use these media resources critically (Krutka et al., 2019).

Similarly, Ahn et al. (2011) also underlined that use of social media and technology blur the boundaries of school, therefore policies must incorporate parents and student responsibilities with new media (p. 9). Even though there are several benefits of incorporating new social media for youth, a thoughtful and critically considered integration of new tools may support students to become literate, considerate and powerful contributors to a technological society.