Social Media - Decentralized Knowledge

(graphic courtesy of: Kes47 (?) / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

A recent paper assigned to our class was on Social Media and Instructional Design, in R.A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.) Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Pearson.   The article discussed the fact that in many educational settings, educators are being encouraged to incorporated social media into their work, in part to leverage the current heavy use of social media by students in other aspects of their lives.

The article notes as an instructional tool, social media can leverage the decentralized structure of information by making learning more learner-centric.  As much learning, especially online learning, is asynchronous, social media can facilitate connections and learning interactions between students outside of a formal class. In this way, I think social media facilitates the constructivism theory of learning.

An example is the ability of students to locate content they are interested which supports specific learning objectives, and then use the content to share, to tag, curate and archive for interactions with other students, either one-on-one or as part of teams, as a way to facilitate decentralized knowledge sharing.