Abigail Morris

English 7701
Research Methods in TPC
Project 4
Brief Scenario: As an instructor of First Year Composition and Writing courses at East Carolina
University and a champion of the benefits of incorporating social media in course pedagogy, I
need to develop a sound understanding of what has been done, what is being done, and what can
be done to bring popular social media platforms into my basic curriculum as tools of
communication, collaboration, collection and reflection.
Question I seek to solve: What must I consider and be aware of while developing a curriculum
that incorporates social media as a tool for students in English 1100?

Writing Together:
Using Social Media to Teach Composition in College
Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more
accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Andrew Sullivan

Twitter provides us with a wonderful platform to discuss/confront

societal problems. We trend Justin Bieber instead.
Lauren Leto

Introduction
The revolution will be digitized. I believe this because the latest generation of college and
university students has grown up in a fully digitized society, and, like it or not, instructors of
composition and writing courses will have to embrace this reality if they want to give their
students the best possible chance of succeeding in this increasingly digital world. This requires
meeting students where they are, and for many if not most students, that means not only in
digital spaces typically associated with education, such as platforms like Blackboard and
Moodle, but through a variety of common social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
etc.) carefully usurped by faculty specifically for their students educational benefits. Of course,
utilizing social media platforms as educational tools can be a daunting task. There are delicate
balances that must be struck and potential pitfalls to be negotiated, but the myriad benefits of

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incorporating social media into composition pedagogy can certainly outweigh the risks, and it is
important to understand why incorporating social media is becoming increasingly necessary.
Developing a plan of action that will bridge the divide between face-to-face classroom-based
interaction and the digital spaces students are familiar and comfortable with also necessitates
knowing what has previously been done with social media in education and what is currently
being done well. The following literature review seeks to do all of that in terms of campus based
face-to-face courses.

Institutionalizing Participatory Culture

There are entire generations of mankind that now exist in a hypertext reality born of the digital
experiences that have shaped the bulk of their lives, and significantly impacted their social roles
and identities. As such, students today are entrenched in participatory cultures which demand
high levels of social interaction in digital communities. These students see the world from a
social perspective . . . that does not discriminate between purely social activity for entertainment
purposes and social activity for learning (Scott, 2012; 55). As integral members of variously
defined user groups that employ rhetorical value as socio-cultural capital (Kimmons, 2014),
these participants feel more connected because they believe their personal contributions
genuinely matter to other members (Bartow, 2014), and students who have been raised in
participatory cultures dont leave these deeply engrained ideals of social interaction behind when
they enter a physical classroom environment. Because of these connectivity needs, students who
are offered the ability to use various forms of social media as part of the learning experience
generally report feelings of greater success in courses that afforded such opportunities (Cao,
Ajjan & Hong, 2013).
Unfortunately, while the rules of participatory culture allow for an academic depth of
discourse that would help students blossom in a variety of disciplines, the demands of that
culture rarely require academic depth in discussion, so the potential for academic discourse tends
to remain exactly that, potential. Too often, the barrage of requirements districts place on public
K-12 educators leaves little time for teachers to help students whose common spaces straddle the
line between physical and digital worlds to adapt the generally self-taught, self-guided logistics
of social media from the purely social space they already know to the academic knowledge
building environment they are being introduced to (Hrastinski & Aghaee, 2012). Thus the

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public, as represented by school boards, may be able to dictate that students should be taught
to use such technology with educational intent in school, while remaining virtually blind to the
constraints that make facilitating technology use in education programs so impossible (Bartow,
2014). The resulting lack of sufficient technology instruction during those formative K-12 years
means that college and/or university level instructors are left with only two options, either forgo
the potential benefits of social media use for collaboration and discourse, or dedicate both time
and resources early in a semester to teaching students how to transition from using social media
for developing socio-cultural capital to using it to build intellectual and cultural capitals.

Educational Concerns of Identity and Community in Social Media

Most students tend to be familiar with various forms of social mediablogs, Twitter, Facebook,
Tumbler, Pinterest, discussion boards, comments sections of webpages, etc.but familiarity and
usability relies on rules based in concepts of social decorum and degrees of anonymity specific
to the platform used that dont often lend themselves constructively to educational spaces. For
instance, research shows that students most frequently use Twitter in and out of educational
environments as a means of information sharing rather than as a conversational or collaborative
space (Lin, Hoffman & Borengasser, 2013), so understanding the limitations posed by the
conventions of Twitter as a platform can inform teachers of the reduced usability of Twitter for
creating a conversationally communicative space.
As a more traditionally communicative space, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and
Snapchat may feature prominently in discourse preferences among students for social contact,
yet there are limitations attached to these platforms as well. Many students are reluctant to
mention Snapchat in front of faculty for the same reason that they admit to avoiding Facebook:
they are uncomfortable with the facultys presence there and fear they are losing their social
refuge by allowing teachers to connect with them in that space (Mendez, Le & Cruz, 2014).
For those reluctant students, these platforms represent longstanding communities in which they
have each diligently constructed elaborate identities that dont necessarily coincide with the
identity each student is trying to cultivate in academia (Kimmons, 2014).
Of course, privacy is a key concern for many students, though few universities have
publicly published policies regarding student privacy concerns, focusing instead on their own
institutional intellectual property and marketing issues (Nathan, MacGougan & Shaffer, 2014).

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This apparent lack of policy may be influenced by the reality that students privacy concerns are
often based on various misinterpretations of terminology, and many students tend to conflate
privacy with forced or accidental exposure of particular identities to unintended others. Students
may then claim privacy violations when they feel that exposure of one constructed identity may
have negatively influenced their relationship with said unintended other (Mendez, Le & Cruz,
2014). Identities are predominately social constructions, and students fear that revealing too
much of their personal lives to teachers or even exposing a different self to their friends and
contacts within a specific digital community can lead to long-term negative effects (Mendez, Le
& Cruz, 2014). Tell a student, you can always just create a new account, separate from your
personal account, and he or she may very well respond with, oh, I am. I dont want my friends
to see me talk that way, when the that way referred to is defined by common academic
conventions rather than their usual social ones.
There is also a fear that friending, liking, or following an instructor on various
social media platforms will expose the student to more about his or her teacher than the student
ever wanted to know. As psycho-sociologist Simon Clarke argues in Culture and Identity
(2011), the way in which people imagine the world to be and imagine the ways that others exist
in the world is central to the construction of identity (p.511), and both students and teachers
may have their understandings of each other in their prescribed roles of teacher and student
challenged by the different masks they wear during encounters in various social environments.
Of course, no users identity is ever an authentic identity, and, be it an instructors or a
students in physical or digital spaces, it is always constructed to fit within the parameters of a
particular social or discourse community. The very fact that identity and questions of

authenticity are tricky for both students and teachers to negotiate opens myriad possibilities
for new levels of discourse in the classroom about ideas of authenticity, community, culture,
and the social construct that is self (Kimmons, 2014).
Critical Engagement through Social Media
In situations where the author in both physical and digital spaces is a classmate or instructor that
they will have to interact with regularly, the student is more likely to offer feedback as a means
of emotional or contextual support, rather than as the act of critical engagement that teachers

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would like to see (Deng & Yuen, 2011). Students must be taught how to use commentary for
more than commiseration and corroboration, and pedagogy plays a pivotal role in this regard
(Hrastinski & Aghaee, 2012). This is especially true for teachers who incorporate blog and bloglike platforms, such as Wordpress, Tumbler, and Weebly, as part of their course requirements.
According to Hariot-Watt University instructor Judy Robertson in an article published in
2011, To be successful university learners, students need to develop skills in self-directed
learning (p.1628). Blogs are one of the most potentially valuable social media platforms
available to both students and teachers for first year composition courses and beyond because of
their semi-unique ability to promote self-directed learning through both authorship and blogreading experiences (Deng & Yuen, 2011). As part of the blog-reading experience, and to
provide a framework for students to begin learning how to blog effectively in first year
composition, it has proven useful for students to spend some time examining the blogs of popular
authors to discover what meta-reflection, thinking and writing about writing, actually looks like
(Johnson, 2010). As part of the authorship experience, Kathryn Crowther in the article Blogging
as process in the composition classroom contends that blogs can create a particularly dynamic
space for writing. Not only does a blog feel personal . . . it also opens up for interactive writing
via the comments and through external linking. It is an excellent way to have students think
about audience when they know that other people, possibly even outside of our class, will be
reading their posts (2011). Likewise, Charles Tryon, in Writing and citizenship: Using blogs to
teach first-year composition, suggests that using blogs can convey the connections between the
classroom and the so-called real world, which seems to exist everywhere else (2006; 128).
These real world connections can greatly enhance students perception of the value of writing
while also yielding opportunities to discuss the increasingly important concept of Kairos.

Collaboration through Social Media

Students can also benefit from incorporation of social media platforms in course work because of
the possibilities they present for greater collaboration. Students who use the popular collection
based platform of Pinterest typically use it to collect stories, images and ideas from all over the
web, but may never really consider the possibility of using Pinterest as a method of collecting
research and data or collaborating with classmates on projects (Gardner, 2014). Using Pinterest
for research and collaboration is something which must be modeled for students first. Other

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platforms also recommended for collaboration include Diigo, VoiceThread, thinglink, and
Popcorn Maker, which also allow users to gather, share, and comment on resources for group or
individual projects and can enable deep interactive engagement with an assigned text (Griffin,
& Minter, 2013).
In a study that compared Facebook to more traditional institutionally based Content
Management Systems like Blackboard and Moodle, the researchers found that Facebook far
outstripped the capabilities of the CMSs in terms of both usability and collaborative qualities,
noting also that Facebooks only downfall was in offering students graded assessment due to
FERPA regulations (Loving & Ochoa, 2011). Facebook as an extension of the classroom also
allows students better access to instructor assistance in a form that is often less rigid than email
correspondence and are, therefore, more conducive to negotiation of confusing concepts,
development of emerging ideas, and proliferation of articles, videos, and other relevant content
as it is newly discovered by all course members (Schwartz, (2010). It should be understood by
both instructors and students that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc., are only part of
the overall learning experience, and work done in digital spaces will always need to be connected
to the face-to-face classroom (Wang, Scown, Urquhart & Hardman, 2012).

Conclusion
The digital world and physical world are steadily merging in ways previously unimaginable as
digital technology changes the way we all live and interact, and is it unfortunate that current
scholarly research does not focus more heavily on best practices in pedagogy that incorporates
social media. If teachers wish to give their students the best possible chance of success in future
endeavors, they must help students to understand how both the digital and physical are
connected. Incorporating the social media platforms students use to collaborate and communicate
with in their personal lives has become a necessary part of establishing that connection. Though
continuing research will always be needed due to the ever evolving and expanding nature of
social media and the digital spaces they occupy, time must be dedicated to teaching students to
use established and emerging platforms in ways that enhance their educational experiences, and
teachers will need to have a firm grasp of what platforms and technologies will work best based
on desired learning outcomes. Research shows that social media platforms like Facebook,

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Twitter, Wordpress, Tumbler, and Pinterest all have a place in education. The trick is teaching
students new ways of thinking about and working in these digital communities.
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education. Educational Studies, 50(1), 36-64.
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