An empirical study of lecturers’ appropriation of social technologies for higher education

Abstract

<p>The use of Online Social Networking (OSN) educational activities has become commonplace in today’s higher education. OSN enables lecturers and students to generate and share content, interact, and collaborate in the knowledge construction process. The pedagogical benefits of social technologies have been widely discussed. However, less is known about the processes that lecturers follow when integrating social technologies into their teaching activities. With the aim of developing a practical guiding framework, this paper examines the processes that lecturers have followed when appropriating social technologies for learning purposes. Based on interviews with fourteen Australian lecturers and sixteen Malaysian lecturers who have used social technologies, different processes of appropriation are explored. Drawing on the empirical findings, this paper proposes a framework that can be used to guide lecturers in appropriating social technologies systematically. The framework will be beneficial for lecturers seeking guidance to support the appropriation of social technologies for structured and formal use in higher education.</p><br />

Professional Online Presence and Learning Networks: Educating for Ethical Use of Social Media

“…Effective teachers and learners must have an open mindset and be prepared to learn in new environments. (Hamid, Waycott, Kurnia, & Chang, 2014;Lim et al, 2014). In what follows, data was generated via journaling of the processes throughout the period of study (2013)(2014)(2015).…”

Awareness of Students on the Usefulness of ICT Toolsin Education: Case of EMU

“…Most researchers proposed that ICT tools advocates for constructivist perspectives in education and that it has the possibility of ubiquitous learning compared to what is previously witnessed in the conventional educational environments [13], [14, [15]. Most literature works have exposed usefulness of ICT tools for educational purposes [16].…”

Appropriating virtual learning environments: A study of teacher tactics

“…Despite the fact that social networking technologies have been on the uprise in computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) for several years now (Hemmi et al, 2009;Hamid et al, 2014), more 'classical' virtual learning environments (VLEs) such as Blackboard are still used most often in practice (Prieto et al, 2013). However, these VLEs have often been criticized over the past decade.…”