BLOG by: Lynn Barnsback
Marketing Education Review Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2009)
Author: Robert E. Boostrom, Jr., Raghu Kurthakoti & John Summey
This article presents the results of an experiment where students use a Segregated Social Network (SSN) to manage class information and team projects for a marketing research class. In addition to helping them during this one class, the authors felt that potential educational benefits of the project would also help students better understand common formats required in the real world.
They wanted a product that was easy to use, allowed for creativity, provided tools for group cohesion & leveraged technology the students were already familiar with. A Marketing Research class was chosen to conduct this study in because of the class wide research project and dynamics requiring frequent student to student contact. They chose a product called Ning.com, which provided them with the ability to add widgets. This functionality incorporated the google calendar into the student’s primary network. This proved to be very useful. Ning.com at the time did not have a chat forum so “Meebo” was added as well to allow this functionality. There was very little learning curve involved as the required skills were very basic and familiar to the students already.
Objectives:
- Prevent messages from getting “lost” (This term appears to describe more accurately “lost in my e-mail”, when a student has so much in the file that they cannot locate items.)
- Keep communication professional as opposed to entertaining (Facebook & MySpace etc are traditionally used for “fun”, by creating a segregated network the authors hoped to eliminate this “feature”)
- Improve the peer to peer communication to aid class project and improve class experience.
- Allow for students personal expression
Objectives Achieved:
- All discussion posts were permanently archived (Students needed to develop a coding system to help in retrieval however)
- Calendar widget helped them track frequent changes to class schedule (was later reported as being the most helpful aspect of the project.)
- Information stayed course related and was not shared with other networks outside the class group. As a result the discussions became more energetic and interactive.
- Members had customizable dedicated home pages allowing the network to appear less formal than Blackboard. Due to the networks isolation from non course networks it functioned in a more formal way.
The students successfully avoided using the network for traditional social networking and as a result the “course management aspect of the SSN was stronger than the entertainment aspect.”
The authors did not use Blackboard because it is to “rigid”, lacks a comment page and therefore looses its peer to peer communication. I found this interesting since although ubiquitous in the teaching/education “industry” most teachers I have worked with do not use Blackboard for class communication. Of further interest is the fact that after the evaluation they decided that while the SSN “provided a more positive environment than e-mail…..it may not be necessarily superior to Blackboard in terms of communication.” I would like to see more on this.
This study was very small, only 55 students used it and 44 responded to the evaluation. The class was also very homogeneous, 85% Caucasian and all were “traditional” students (I assume this 18-20 and means full-time.) The authors felt in the end that because the communication flow was easier students could “potentially focus more time on the learning process.” Students who can manage class material better (thanks to the calendar) can in theory learn more. I think the idea of a dedicated network is good; I am not necessarily convinced by this article that it is necessary. Maybe the perfect tool has not been written yet or maybe it is a case by case/class by class determination. Clearly using one is not a problem but is it an asset?
The study of the use of customized social networks like Ning in learning is not very extensive, and thus this report really does add to our knowledge of the advantages/disadvantages of the integration of a particular kind of information and communication technology into teaching and learning.
Again, the report of the great value attached to the calendar in students’ responses suggests that the integration of ICTs does make visible some very basic learning needs, like keeping track of dates and the time management skills necessary to meet them.
Also, the value of learning about tagging is critical: as students learn to develop their own taxonomies for the organization of their own materials, they are much more open to understanding the taxonomies by which other forms of information are categorized, such as research databases, etc.
This seems a very rich piece indeed, with, as you note, Lynn, many aspects for further investigation.
I’m unclear as to the issues with Blackboard. I have used it as a student in classes with discussions and do not recall any restrictions on either threaded discussions or one-on-one.