Learning and the Affordances of Social Media | W4 Q1 | Forum

The theory of learning that I will be enacting in this post will be constructivism, particularly social constructivism. Constructivism emphasizes that people actively construct their own knowledge by building on their previous experiences and background knowledge. The previous knowledge, beliefs, experiences, and insights of a person are foundational to the construction of new knowledge formation. Learning is an active process that requires social interaction amongst learners and the role of the teacher is to act as a facilitator rather than a transmitter of knowledge that dispenses information to passive learners. Further, social constructivism emphasizes collaboration, particularly the collaborative nature of knowledge, positing that knowledge develops from how people interact with each other, their communities, their culture, and society.

Social media offers affordances and supports that aid this type of learning. Manca & Ranieri (2016; 2013) highlight some of the affordances of Facebook including mixing and integrating information and learning resources, hybridization of expertise, widening context of learning to bridge across formal and informal learning, support and encourage peer interaction, cultivating a sense of community, and encourage democratic participation amongst all peers in the classroom. Similiarly, Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes (2009) emphasize some of the affordances of Web 2.0 including “a) user-defined linkages between users and content (e.g., posting on others’ pages), (b) simple mechanisms to share multimedia content (e.g., blogs), (c) prominent personal profiling (e.g., displaying user preferences on customized profile pages), and (d) intertechnology applications, enabling interfaces with services and features on other sites, for example, sites that offer alternative designs for MySpace pages or widgets that plug information from one site into another (p. 247).” As such, Greenhow et al. (2009) contend that learner participation and creativity and online identity formation emerge as important affordances of social media.

Both Manca & Ranieri (2016; 2013) and Greenhow et al. (2009) demonstrate a number of affordances that support a synergistic relationship between social network sites and social constructivist learning theory. The use of social network sites, for example, affords students with an opportunity to express their background knowledges, beliefs, thoughts, ideas, engage with and stimulate discussion between peers and other users, requires active thinking and engagement from its users, allows learners to connect with and formulate communities of learners wherein they can collaborate with one another to construct knowledge based upon their background knowledge, experiences, and interaction with their peers and other users. In a constructivist view of learning, knowledge is co-constructed, learning is active, and social interaction is central, tenets in which all are supported, perhaps even enhanced, by the use of social networking sites.

For this post, I would like to consider Twitter as a site that mutually supports social constructivist learning theory. Twitter has particular affordances that allow users to engage in collaborative discussion, peer interaction, co-construction of knowledge, and social interaction that are aligned with a constructivist learning theory. Twitter allows users to post their ideas, thoughts, and opinions, tag other users to engage in lively and active discussion, hashtag relevant phrases and/or keywords in order to categorize tweets and easily connect to others who are also hashtagging the same keywords and/or phrases, reshare and comment on others’ tweets, post videos, links, pictures, memes, and other forms of creative expression, and engage in socially and culturally relevant dialogue with other users. These affordances are aligned with a social constructivist view of learning as it centers social interaction, peer to peer discussion, and co-construction of knowledge.