Purpose:This conceptual paper considers the pedagogical, disciplinary, and institutional implications of social media for higher education.

Approach: The article examines current theories on educational technology and social media in the context of specific social media (Second Life and iTunesU) used in pilot programs.

Findings: The article finds that social media dramatically alter the material contexts in which we make decisions about how to organize people and information in higher education. The operation of social media, particularly the low costs of group formation and risk-taking, are difficult to accommodate within the traditional institutional structures of higher education.

Originality/value: This article expands the conversation of social media in higher education beyond the limited (though certainly significant) tasks of technical innovation and policy-making to recognize the larger institutional and disciplinary challenges and opportunities they represent.

Keywords: social media, Second Life, iTunesU, pedagogy, distributed learning environments

Emerging media-network technologies, applications, and practices raise a broad range of challenges for higher education, indeed for education in general. As these technocultural changes really affect us on a global scale, in nearly every aspect of our culture, it should come as no surprise that almost everyone involved in education finds themselves addressing these challenges in some way. The intersection of these emerging technologies and education opens a significant space of inquiry that potentially questions some of our fundamental assumptions and values regarding education. In fact, one may go even farther and suggest that we are in a cultural moment where we are questioning our very ideas of how we think and what we understand knowledge to be. This is certainly the thrust of recent books like David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (2007)and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008).In short, we are faced with questions regarding the ontological and epistemological foundations of education. It would be grossly misleading to suggest that technologies are the sole cause of these conditions, let alone that they will determine the outcome of our situation. However, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the specific ways in which our technological and material conditions participate in our educational practices and decision-making. The importation of social media is about far more than the inclusion of a wiki or blog feature in a course management system. It’s about understanding how emerging technologies alter the equations upon which we calculate possible and effective means to organize people and information. This article considers the effects of social media on the relations between students, faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as its implications for our conventional understanding of the disciplinary organization of knowledge.

Given the rapid development of social media, it is difficult to predict how higher education will respond. Almost certainly the response will be discontinuous, with the diversity of strategies pursued by educational institutions matched only by the diversity of the missions, resources, and contexts of the institutions themselves. It is certainly conceivable, as some of my fellow authors have suggested in our discussion on the e-Literate weblog, that an open learning management system (LMS) might allow for the integration of various web 2.0 modules from a range of vendors and development communities. Such an approach might resemble in some ways the role of applications in Facebook, where faculty could select modules to include in their courses from a menu of options. Such an LMS, however, would almost certainly be loaded onto an institution’s server. Control over user permissions, access, available modules, and other pertinent decisions would be set by institutional policy, committees, and administrators. From the institutional perspective, the desire if not perceived obligation to exert such control is understandable. Unfortunately, this impetus for control, integral to institutional identity, runs counter to the open, participatory operation of social media.

Indeed, once one sets aside the institutional perspective, the requirements for an LMS look very different. Why would one limit oneself to the options available in a single LMS platform when one can take the entire network as a platform? No single corporation or open source developer community will ever be able to match the innovative potential of the entire social media community. As Clay Shirky (2008) explains, institutional bureaucracies developed because they represented the most efficient means available for organizing the efforts of a large number of people engaged in complex, collective tasks. However, institutions bear with them inherent operating costs that make some practices untenable. For example, it is not possible for any single college or university to support the instructional use of every piece of social media available on the Web. Individual faculty, however, operating across institutions can make choose from among all available social media, incorporate those applications into their courses, and find support for their work through online communities of faculty. I don’t meant to suggest that the resulting brew of different social media from one faculty to the next within an institution is an ideal response to the challenges of social media. I simply mean to suggest here, as Shirky has, that social media offer possibilities for organization that significantly challenge the historical advantages that institutionalization has offered.

Before anyone begins to imagine the potential chaotic revolution of hundreds of professors across a campus mixing up their own combinations of social media, one should recognize that most faculty have little desire to engage in such practice. The existing role of faculty affords little if any time for innovating with technology for pedagogical purposes. To create a context where the majority of faculty understood their professional responsibilities to include the incorporation of emerging technologies into the curriculum, one would have to redefine the role of faculty on an international, cross-disciplinary scale. Otherwise, the month I might spend in the summer evaluating new technologies, learning to use them, and reworking my syllabi to incorporate them is better spent doing research and staying current in my field. One cannot simply add this responsibility for technology onto faculty without redefining overall faculty workload. Clearly this would require a significant transformation of higher education. On the other hand, if faculty from across the disciplines do not become involved in the articulation of emerging technologies into higher education, then such decisions will be made by others: educational technology corporations, accrediting agencies, multi-institutional organizations, and so on. Either way, higher education will be transformed.

The idea that social media might transform the entirety of higher education may seem hyperbolic to some. For the first decade of the Internet, it was largely possible to think of the online world as separate and separable from the face-to-face experience of conventional pedagogy. One could choose to include an online element or even teach an online course, but one could also keep the Web out of the classroom, even going so far as to forbid the use of “online sources.” Today, however, participatory media networks and wireless technology bring social media into every pedagogic context. The immediate nature of face-to-face instruction often leads us to imagine that the practice of such teaching is largely driven by the local interactions between students and faculty. However, drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), developed by sociologist Bruno Latour (2005) and others, one can map how local events are linked as nodes on extensive networks of materials, institutions, policies, and technologies. Latour offers some insight into the networked condition of face-to-face pedagogy in the following assessment of the lecture hall:

This local site has been made to be a place by some locus through the now silent mediation of drawings, specifications, wood, concrete, steel, varnish, and paint; through the work of many workers and artisans who have now deserted the scene because they let objects carry their action in absentia; through the agency of alumni whose generous deeds might be rewarded by some bronze plaque. Locals are localized. Places are placed. And to remain so, myriads of people, behind the doors, have to keep up the premises so that you can remain, you along with your students, safely “in it.” (2005)

This only begins us thinking about the distributed network supporting the physical space of the classroom. One might also consider the international network of disciplinary structures that authorizes both the professor and the curriculum, which ranges from publishers to reviewers to accrediting bodies. And there are the broad range of college institutional structures, financing programs, and of course technological networks as well. There are a near inexhaustible list of nodes on the distributed network that supports the gathering of students and faculty into a classroom. Each of these mediates the events in this locale; each provides a degree of agency. The addition of social media alters the characteristics of the place in which we teach regardless of whether we choose to incorporate them or they are simply present because wireless access flows through the room. Social media have a different quality from these other nodes however because the dramatically reorient academia’s relationship with the rest of the world, bringing a global participatory network into direct contact with the classroom.

In the Fall 2007 semester, I employed Second Life for the first time in one of my courses. I had been exploring SL for about a year and knew that several of my colleagues in the library were very involved in it. The college had established a small grant program to support teaching “millennial students,” and my librarian colleagues and I received $2500. We also received some support from Information Resources to purchase an island. The librarians built Cortland’s island, while I piloted courses there, along with a few other faculty I had recruited. The librarians had developed their knowledge of SL by collaborating with faculty and staff from other colleges who had already established an SL presence. Similarly I drew upon online communities like the SL educators discussion list and wiki. Such professional development strategies are familiar to faculty and staff who already work with social media. However it is difficult to imagine that a college would have sought to implement new educational technology, even as a pilot, by such means five years ago. Ten years ago, such resources simply wouldn’t have existed. In short, an entirely new network of media and information structures the development of pedagogies in social media, and clearly not all of it emerges from existing educational institutions.

While new networks and actors are becoming involved in education through social media, more traditional institutional entities find themselves struggling. As we piloted Second Life, our academic computing staff faced the challenge of providing access to the SL client for students in campus computing labs. There was little or no campus technical support for students beyond the faculty and staff participants in the pilot. Two semesters later, the number of faculty interested in Second Life continues to grow but issues of support continue to be a challenge. So far, we have only implemented SL as a portion of courses. It is uncertain if the college could respond to a course taught in real time, with a scheduled meeting time, but a virtual location. Such matters may seem easy to address, but this rarely turns out to be the case. At a medium-sized institution like SUNY Cortland, the coordination costs of campus management are extensive. It has proven difficult to incorporate the campus CMS into the college’s curriculum. It is harder to imagine institutionalizing the perpetual beta of social media. As Clay Shirky (2008) explains, “Small decreases in transaction costs make businesses more efficient, because the constraints of the institutional dilemma get less severe. Large decreases in transaction costs create activities that can’t be taken on by businesses, or indeed by an institution, because no matter how cheap it becomes to perform a particular activity, there isn’t enough payoff to support the cost incurred by being an institution in the first place.”

There is a fundamental disconnect between the low-risk--and thus experimental--environment of social media and the risk-averse--and thus conservative--environment of higher education. In the perpetual beta of social media, one is continually adopting new practices. Because the costs involved in such practices are low, failure is not a significant concern. From an institutional perspective, higher education is not only averse to the risks of failure, it also desires to succeed in predictable, measurable, reproducible ways. This has increasingly become the case with the growing pressure for external assessment of colleges and universities. The emphasis on predictably contravenes one of the integral values of social media. While we may be able to predict on a general level that social media engenders the formation of new social groups, behaviors, and goals, it is far more difficult to predict which groups will be sustainable, what particular behaviors they will develop, and how they will articulate their goals. This is even more difficult looking at a relatively small group of participants. That is, what we might say about 18-24 year-old Americans in relation to YouTube may not apply to students on my campus and will say even less about the particular students enrolled in my course. Indeed, if one makes a range of social media available to students in a course, one will discover that attitudes toward, and use of, that social media will vary from one section of the course to another. This unpredictability is then intensified over time as applications develop and new practices emerge from one semester to the next. Of course it is possible to reduce this unpredictability by asserting teacherly authority and establishing specific directions for the use of various social media, but in doing this, one is counteracting the interactive potential that leads one to social media in the first place. Total control is not possible. A free-for-all is undesirable for pedagogic purposes. Instead, a social media pedagogy must necessarily be contextual, flexible, and responsive. Such pedagogies are shaped by the complex network of materials, institutions, and disciplines in which they are situated. Serious reform of teaching, as well as any significant incorporation of social media into higher education, cannot be accomplished without addressing those contexts. Such reforms can be undertaken, but it is difficult to imagine them occurring at a pace that can match the perpetual beta and rapid group formation of social media.

For example, SUNY Cortland has been using iTunesU since 2006. However only a handful of faculty have adopted the technology. To institutionalize iTunesU would require extensive marketing, education, training, and support. It would also mean developing a technological infrastructure by which lectures could be recorded and uploaded. In short, there would be extensive costs. What happens if it fails? What happens if a new technology emerges in two years? Even if one imagined the college had the resources to gamble in the first place, would it be responsible for the institution to take that risk? What is more likely, and what is already commonly visible, is the adoption of social media by individual faculty and the organic development of learning collaborations and support networks occurring outside of institutional structures. Individually I can do for myself what the institution cannot. I can produce podcasts with the technology I have laying around. I can find the training and support I need online. I am better off engaging in many of these activities without institutional support than I would be if I mired myself in institutional bureaucracy. And the institution is better off as well, at least in the short term.

However, as Shirky notes in the example of open source, the coordinating power and low transaction costs of networking present a long term challenge to institutions: “Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea” (2008). So not only is it the case that I, as an individual faculty member, can afford to fail where my institution cannot. This situation is replicated thousands of times over: thousands of faculty taking individual, low-cost risks. Institutions, on the other hand, necessarily favor low-risk, predictable outcomes and thus favor consistent mediocrity over inconsistent excellence. However distributed networks can draw upon the inconsistent but excellent contributor. Where it is impossible for the college to institutionalize applications that serve the interests of a handful of faculty, a distributed learning environment beyond the institution can easily encompass them. As such, we see the development of a very different actor-network. Where the network extending from the lecture hall is largely within the grasp of the institution, social media establishes a very different set of actor-networks, significantly altering the role of the institution in the classroom.

The effect of social media on curriculum is only one aspect of its larger, potential impact on faculty-academic culture. At their core, universities are designed to organize and conserve knowledge. In this respect they are much like the libraries that operate as a kind of intellectual common ground on every campus. The organization of departments represents a powerful worldview as C.P. Snow recognized in his identification of two, often clashing, university cultures, the humanities and the sciences. The arboreal organization of institutional epistemology, often materially re-staged in the distribution of buildings and offices on campus, drills down through departments into faculty specialization, majors offered, curriculum design, and even into the construction of specific course syllabi and assignments. This then maps back onto the library, so when you take your course in Shakespeare as an English major, you are likely to spend some time in the library stacks between PR2199 and PR3195. Of course not every book on Shakespeare is shelved in English Renaissance (1500-1640), but most are. Of course, the Library of Congress classification system probably says more about the nature of the Library’s book collection in 1897 (when the system was originally devised) than about the nature of the universe; university epistemologies are likewise structured to deal primarily with their own material and institutional constraints. So what occurs when those constraints are erased or altered? This is precisely what social media offers.

As David Weinberger explains, the organization of books in a library or faculty on a campus is an issue of “first-order organization,” where “we organize things themselves--we put silverware into drawers, books on shelves, photos in albums” (2007). Obviously faculty members and books can only be in one place at a time. Card catalogs are Weinberger’s example of a second-order organization. While they offer the ability to abstract information about objects and present the information in different ways, they are still limited, as Weinberger puts it, by “the fact that they arrange atoms“ (2007).That is, a card catalog is still constructed of cards and can only be so large; it can offer only a limited number of ways to present data. Departments and curriculum are also second-order organizations identified in college catalogs and other documents. As with library card catalogs, course catalogs can organize departments and courses in multiple ways: an alphabetical list of departments, departments by school or college, courses that satisfy general education requirements, courses by major, courses by department, and so on. Although, both library and college catalogs are now primarily offered online, they remain largely a reflection of their print heritage. And these organizations are not merely matters of arrangement, they obviously dictate practices as well. That is, the organization of courses in a catalog also assigns limits to the choices students have on their path to degrees. Most colleges offer students the option of creating custom degrees (with college approval), but rarely do students choose this path. While large universities might offer more than 100 different undergraduate majors, that number is dwarfed by the possible combinations of courses students might take to accumulate the 120 credits or so required for graduation if a university had no requirements.

Social media represents Weinberger’s third-order organization. The third-order is natively digital. We see it in photo-sharing sites like Flickr and social bookmarking sites like Delicious. It would be incorrect to say that there are no material constraints to third-order organization. Someone must add photos to Flickr and links to Delicious. Those additions must be described and tagged. This activity is clearly “crowd-sourced” to the many users of these sites. The point of third-order organization, however, is that the items within the database may be organized according to any set of criteria offered in any order. That is, there is no single dominant order to a digital collection as there is to books on library shelves. There is not a physically limited number of organizations as there is for cards in a library catalog or courses in a college catalog. What might this mean for college curriculum and teaching? For one thing, it would mean the ability to map, and capitalize upon, connections between courses across a campus if not around the world.

Take, for example, a course I teach titled PWR209: Writing in the Digital Age. This course appears four times in the SUNY Cortland college catalog. There is the course description itself. It is listed as one of a menu of courses that meets a particular general education requirement for “Science, Technology, Values, and Society.” It is a required course for the professional writing major, and it is an elective course for the college’s major in new communications media. In a social media context, however, there would be no necessary limit to the number of ways the course could be characterized and thus organized. One could list the types of assignments (e.g. blogging, podcasting, video production) or texts assigned or topics as defined by me and my students. Indeed the course could be tagged with any term (e.g. easy, hard, boring, cool, etc.). There could be students’ comments and ratings. There could be recommendation engines like those found on Amazon (if you like this course, you might also take...). As a professor, I might discover a colleague who is teaching the same texts as I am or covering related material, thus giving us an opportunity to collaborate in some ad hoc fashion. Students could discover similar connections and have an opportunity to follow a more organic path of intellectual interest. If we could somehow escape the heavy hand of institutional management that typifies both the CMS and the organization of curriculum, then we might discover the rich patterns of connection that have always been part of university culture but have remained largely inaccessible.

What could the institution or faculty or students do with such information? As I mentioned, most schools offer the option for students to customize a degree, but what would happen if every student decided to do so? What would happen if every student took up the information he or she could find about the best professors, course readings and assignments, and course lectures and other content, and designed their own curriculum? What would happen if we required students to do so? To customize the final two years of their education and claim an intellectual interest? To articulate a rationale for their choices? Before now, the organizational costs of such a venture were insurmountable. The institution with its catalog curriculum, despite its heavy bureaucratic costs, was the best option. Increasingly that situation is shifting. Social media would certainly allow students to share their choices and preferences just as they share musical tastes and plan parties today. However, such a move would clearly disrupt the institutional role of departments and faculty, even though it would be technically possible within the terms of most existing college curricula. That said, disruption is not erasure. Faculty and departments would find themselves in a position to build new relations with one another and with their students.

This shift was clear in a very modest way in my own courses. During our pilot program with Second Life, the students were able to collaborate with students in classes from Japan, South Korea, Canada, France, and elsewhere in the U.S. As faculty, we were able to make connections between courses, even though the ostensible subject matter we were teaching was quite different, ranging from courses in American culture to writing to architecture. Environments like Second Life have the potential to become vast, educational venues where students can gather to hear speakers, participate in conferences, conduct experiments, and collaborate on projects that extend beyond the virtual world. We supplemented our SL collaborations with a wiki to allow for some asynchronous collaboration as well. For my students, the prospect was very challenging. The only workable time for all students would have meant that students in my class were online at 8AM (afternoon in France, late night on the Pacific Rim). 8AM turned out to not be feasible for my students. I learned that in the future I would have to incorporate meeting times into my online courses (though I haven’t worked out how to explain this to the college registrar).

In other semesters, I have collaborated with a colleague at North Dakota State University on various projects with the students interacting asynchronously on blogs and wikis. Our students worked together in groups providing feedback to one another on writing projects. This collaboration has proven difficult as well, as students struggle to develop relationships with their distant colleagues. They remain uncertain how to respond to one another and unsure what obligations they bear to one another. Despite the experience students may have with social networking in other contexts, in the classroom, they think of themselves as students. That means they tend to look for specific directions to follow from their professor. Obviously it is rather hard to develop relationships when interactions occur only according to specific directions. Social media will not only demand new behaviors from faculty but will also require students to behave differently in the classroom. Such collaborations have not always been easy. Students are inexperienced with such collaborations; they need to uncover how to develop working relationships with students at a distance. Faculty face similar hurdles as they figure out how to interact with another professor’s students. Perhaps at some point in the future though, when a critical mass of faculty and students are experienced and comfortable with working in this fashion, faculty and students might share course projects and create collaborations on the fly on an international scale.

Clearly these are modest examples in comparison with the more radical possibilities of extending the logic, values, and practices of social media throughout the university. By the same token they are more likely practices, things that faculty have already done. Even in these modest encounters with social media, we come face-to-face with our own pedagogic commitments and desire for control as teachers. It is commonplace today to speak of student-centered pedagogy, but social media really puts that value to the test. As faculty are we willing to teach in a public space? Are we open to the risks of faculty collaboration? Will we allow our students the freedom to develop and organize knowledge for our courses in substantive ways? There’s very little point in importing social media into a course management system where it is hidden from public view and accessible only to course members. Certainly some course information needs to be handled in this way, and there can and ought to be granular levels of privacy and access, but ultimately the power of social media lies in collaborating in as open a way as possible. Social media tests our commitment as intellectuals to the open production, sharing, and discussion of knowledge.

In the end, though, as faculty, administrators, and staff in higher education, we must recognize that the role of social media in our institutions and on our campuses is not entirely in our hands. Institutions, like individual faculty, can choose to embrace social media as fully as possible or take up some limited engagement or even try to ignore or limit social media on campuses and in classrooms. All around us, however, social media will continue to proliferate, and our students will likely continue to draw on social media to achieve their educational goals. The networks of knowledge, media, and collaboration have been altered in our classrooms even if we do nothing at all. As I’ve been suggesting here, the ability of our institutions to address the challenges and possibilities of social media will not only rest on our ability to meet the technical challenges of integrating emerging technologies, it will more significantly reflect the ability of our institutions to shift structurally and take advantage of what social media makes possible. There is obviously no clear answer as to how this should unfold, except that we must all become more conscious of the way our academic-disciplinary values and practices have been shaped by the historically contingent factors of technological and institutional conditions that are now changing.

Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford UP, Oxford, UK.

Shirky, C. (2008), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, New York, Penguin.

Weinberger, D. (2007), Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Holt, New York.