Evaluation of a project to build and launch an internal social network for informal and formal teaching in higher education.

1. INSTITUTIONAL SOCIAL NETWORKS:
A TOOL FOR
STUDENT COMMUNICATION AND TEACHING?
Bernadette John Stylianos Hatzipanagos
King’s College London
8th Excellence in Teaching conference, King’s College London

2. Overview of talk
• Social Media in Higher education: opportunities
• KINSHIP: a social network for King’s
• KINSHIP evaluation:
• Implications for formal/informal learning
• Digital professionalism
• Towards the mobile social networking site:
lessons from KINSHIP

3. Social media and user-generated content’
• Collective and collaborative information is gathered,
shared, modified and redistributed in creative acts;
• Personal sites and content increasingly belong to the
so called ‘me media’ category;
• The user controls the choice of tools and services;
• The ‘collective intelligence’ of users is harnessed
through aggregation and large-scale cooperative
activities
(Hatzipanagos & Warburton 2009)

4. Social Media:
A map

5. Digital literacies for 21st century
learners
• Generation Y (also known as the Millennial) uses
technology at higher rates than people from other
generations
• Digital divide
• Digital natives vs. digital immigrants: (probably a
myth); digital residents and digital visitors.
• Peer-oriented due to easier facilitation of
communication through technology
• Multitasking

6. Ubiquity and multi-functionality:
• Blogs (reflective aspect)
• Wikis (collaborative construction of knowledge)
• Social bookmarking (sharing personal references
with some form of commentary/tagging)
• Social networking (discussion, communication in
formal and informal spaces)
• Immersive environments (virtual worlds, MUVEs)
• e-portfolios to showcase achievement
Social Media in Higher Education:
some examples

7. Social media : opportunities
Social media can support & sustain communities
much better than previous generations of learning
technologies, where institutional barriers undermined
any initiatives for embedding formal and informal
learning.

8. Student communities and social media :
opportunities
Social media can help users to:
– Link to professional communities that can provide feedback, support and
professional identity scaffolding.
– Develop an appropriate, professional digital voice
– Link to other learner and expert groups, crossing the curriculum horizontally
and vertically, so that members are not confined by disciplinary/progression
barriers in sharing experiences and learning from others.
– Link to co-curricular and interdisciplinary groups.
– Embed informal and formal lines of communication.
– Create self help sub-groups that can move between boundaries, following a
Communities of Practice trajectory.
– Embed Formal/informal assessment places with an emphasis on formative
rather than summative activities.
Hatzipanagos (in press)

9. KINSHIP: a social networking site for King’s
students

10. Findings: evaluating KINSHIP
• Majority of students positive about using KINSHIP as a
digital platform to develop their professional voice and
profiles, ….
• But few actually embraced it fully
• advantage of KINSHIP compared to other social
networks, as it is more exclusive targeting people from
King’s and mainly being used for academic purposes.
• Users seem to respond favourably to the separation of
purely social interactions and work/academic informal or
semi formal interactions

11. Findings: Online learning for nursing
students using KINSHIP
• Online discussions during the elective period
can facilitate critical thinking about global health
across a range of global health competencies
• Online discussion can facilitate critical reflection
and support global health learning
• Students may not actively participate in an
optional online programme unless it’s tied to
assessment.
Molly Fyfe and Paula Baraitser (November, 2013)

12. YAMMER: learning from the KINSHIP
experience
• Microsoft Office 365 is integrating Yammer
(our Outlook, excel, word etc. is moving towards
cloud hosting and Yammer will be added to this
suite)
• Simple authentication – towards single sign on
• Help students to establish their digital voice on a
mainstream enterprise communications suite
• Improved communications for collaboration and
group working
• Potential for mobile accessibility and
functionality upgrades

13. Lessons learnt: towards successful
adoption of a social platform
• A clear identity is required to achieve wider adoption.
• Development and evolution of functionality in step with
commercial platforms
• Improved accessibility via link from front page of KCL
website and redeveloping as a mobile application
• Addressing privacy concerns raised by the students
about potential monitoring by staff/institution
• Actively and consistently promote to students and staff
any internal platform in order to ensure traffic

14. Any questions?
14This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
License.