Social networking in the classroom

Campus Technology magazine recently published The Super-Secret, Never-Before-Revealed Guide to Web 2.0 in the Classroom. The screen capture above comes from this article. There are 25 steps, ways, and tips for social networking integration. Is the digital infrastructure on campus ready for social networking integration into classes, both face-to-face and online? Social networking already happens every minute someone on campus, be it a student, university employee, or faculty member, logs on to update their Facebook page, tweet the latest news, or check the latest post on a Ning site that they belong to. That is not to say that social networking isn't already being used in a small percentage of classes. However, if it continues to grow as younger faculty enter the professoriate ranks, will campus information technology networks be ready to handle more status updates and tweets? What is a college's obligation to support network traffic that delivers course content outside of the supported content delivery systems?

Research on social networking and it's affect on teaching and learning is just beginning to surface in scholarly journals and periodicals. Many of the resources that I found were articles in mainstream publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist, Campus Technology, and Inside Higher Education. However, what I did find has been published in the last three years as social networking has weaved it's way into online and face-to-face courses. Junco, Heibergert, and Loken (2010) did a study on the effect of Twitter on college engagement and grades at a Midwest university using a 1-credit course for their sample (both control and experimental groups established) and found that "using Twitter produced a more rich discussion students relationship's to themes covered in the book than would have been possible during the limited class time" (p.8). Average grades for the experimental group were higher than the control group that did not use Twitter. In essence, Twitter extended the conversation to the back-channel, which is a term used in many other contexts like professional conferences, where it is used to extend the conversation and flow of information. The back-channel, though, also required an extra time commitment from faculty teaching the course. An extra time commitment that many are not willing or able to accommodate.

Those that are willing to try new methods of teaching using social networking are considered digital early adopters. They have little regard for sticking their neck out and trying something new. Graduate teaching assistants are many of those at the forefront of trying to incorporate social networking into teaching and learning strategies. Someday, some of them will be faculty members, tenure track or adjunct, and social networking might move into the mainstream of instructional technology delivery methods. Already, some institutions like Purdue University, have stepped forward to create their own Twitter-like micro-blogging platform called Hotseat. Why have Twitter servers host the classroom back-channel when it can be kept in-house. "Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site" (Purdue University, 2009). It is homegrown social networking with a touch of the familiar tools of the trade. The digital infrastructure better be ready, because the tweets are coming.

iLibrary

Ask doctoral students and master's students about how they went about obtaining their resources for literature reviews, research papers, and policy reviews. Chances are many of them never stepped foot into their campus library. Digital infrastructure is as much about digital libraries as it is about email, cloud computing, social networking, and course management systems. The concept of the "iLibrary" is not so far-fetched as one thinks.

Campus libraries are under great pressure to keep information at the fingertips of its users whether they physically visit the structure or access resources electronically. The dark side of this demand is that publishers are holding librarians hostage with rising licensing costs and discontinuation of print editions. Each year, research publication managers at campus libraries must survey faculty to see what journals are really essential to have as part of the holdings. In an effort to be "green" and accommodate journal and periodical requests, the choice is made to stay digital and forego print. Of course, electronic versions of resources have been around for decades in the form of microfilm and microfiche. Libraries have always had to deal with running out of physical space for ALL the books, journals and periodicals it needed to have on hand. Microfilm and microfiche saved space, but users still have to visit the library to retrieve their contents. Digital copies in the format of PDFs, HTML and direct hyperlinks to publishers give users the freedom of access without walls. Projects like the Google Books initiative take the idea of the iLibrary even further.

In 2007, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), which includes all the Big Ten schools plus the University of Chicago, partnered with Google to digitize as many of 10 million volumes across the CIC library systems. In the same year, several other institutions and libraries signed agreements with Google's Book project. A year later, after the settlement of a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Indiana University became the first CIC member to provide Google with volumes to digitize and in October of 2010, Northwestern University sent it's first volumes to Google for digitization. In an article in the Daily Northwestern, Scott Devine, head of University Library preservation is quoted saying, "Now when students go into the library and search for a title, they will see the original paper copy and a link to the digital copy. We are going to be able to provide access to literally millions of volumes online that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise" (Brown, 2010). With millions of books in digital format through the Google Book project and other initiatives like MIT Press offering select published books as free downloadable PDFs, the importance of libraries and the digital infrastructure required to support thousands, if not millions, of access requests to digital books is becoming the growing giant in the digital playground.

Scholarship in the digital age also includes the ability to search the publications in digital libraries. Without the power of the search, digital publications might as well be in print. Christine Borgman states that, "The content of digital libraries includes data, metadata that describe various aspects of the data (e.g. representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights), and metadata that consist of links and relationships to other data or metadata, whether internal or external to the digital library" (2007). Not only do digital publications represent a new way of scholarship, but they are a new challenge to the digital infrastructure of institutional libraries to provide the means (i.e. servers, software, databases) of finding the information a scholar desires as part of their research process. As more publications move out of print and into digital formats, current and future academics will rely on the iLibrary to serve up scholarly search results from just about anywhere but the physical space known as the library. More and more, libraries will become digital portals in addition to the brick and mortar cocoon of knowledge and information.