December 2020 – Teachers Who Know Me

Social media tools and platforms – Reflection on INF506 Module 3

OLJ Task: Social news sites – My Musings

Recent events have caused a major cultural shift in how we view ‘news’ and the media responsible for ‘reporting’ the ‘news.’ Yet, it is not actually all that recent. I myself (born in the 1970’s) can remember turning off the television or radio when the news came on, because it was just a report of everything that went bad in the world on that day, not to mention the fact that the glossiness and gleaming smiles of the presenters did not match my reality and provided me no social capital. My sister in law prefers Instagram to Facebook for exactly that reason: she finds Facebook brings her down, where Instagram less so. Many of my colleagues refuse to engage in a professional Facebook page because they claim ‘we don’t use it for that.’ This concept of being lost in the quagmire of negative ‘news’ (or the ‘negativity bias’ of humans) is not new as seen in publications such as this BBC news article (Stafford, 2014).

In any discussion around society (online or otherwise) it is important to recognise that human societal narratives are a result of their environment, not the cause. While face-to-face interactions have had a series of ‘rules’ and guidelines for civility, online interactions by comparison are merely at their infancy stage and so too are the devices which regulate them.

When looking at the following online news media sites: reddit, Digg, Newsvine, Hacker News, and Nuzzel I look hesitantly. I suppose I am old school? I like my news to be newsworthy? I dislike having to sift through advertising (often made to look like news) – its exhausting! Reddit pages that I follow or that they’ve selected for me based on what I’ve put in as my ‘interests’ tell me ‘lurkers are welcome.’ Digg has a better layout, more professional…Newsvine is run by NBC which I know to be a local network out to make a profit. HackerNews – no thanks, hacking is illegal and I don’t want to be a party to it even remotely. Apparently ‘top influencers’ use Nuzzel…is this what we’ve come to? Aspiring to be a ‘top influencer?’

UPDATE: For more academic reflections on social news media, please see my (extra) blog post: This Just In – Reflecting on the 2021 American Insurrection.

Social media tools and platforms – Reflection on INF506 Module 3

First of all, how cool is the website “Internet Live Stats?” My mind boggles at the amount of background work required to obtain this information and I wonder at its reliability…? But, it certainly offers a clear view at how daunting it would be to keep up with all of those platforms in a small company!

Continuing on from my previous blog post, individual contexts (eg. schools) need to identify the platforms, websites, blogs and social media that would best engage their users or prospective users and develop a digital (learning) environment (DLE) framework. To paraphrase Stoddart, Chan & Liu (2016, p.143):

“(While) an excellently considered and employed facilitation framework in no way guarantees a successful outcome… a non-existent framework or poorly facilitated project will certainly limit the chances of a successful project.”

2. In order to determine which platforms to use or how to use them in your context, consider the most populated social media platforms, who is using them (eg. according to Komljenovic (2018) more high-income earners might use LinkedIn, XING, ResearchGate or Academia.edu) and how often they are using them. As of October, 2020, Statista have identified the following social media platforms as the most popular, based on ‘active users’:

(Image hyperlinks to Statista Global Social Networks October 2020)

3. While digital environments have the capacity to improve our lives, we need to plan for maintaining a safe, professional and healthy work-life balance on social media and online overall. Specifically, in terms of social media, we need to be mindful of possible negative impacts for ourselves as professionals as well as for our users, particularly with regards to physical health, mental health, life satisfaction and body mass index (Shakya & Christakis, 2017). Shakya & Christakis (2017) recommend we plan how we will attempt to exponentially increase face-to-face interactions in order to counteract the negative impact of online interactions, and to maintain a policy of quality social media interaction rather than quantity of social media interaction. (NOTE: I have also discussed in previous blog posts how, as teacher librarians, we need to work to assist our colleagues and students to manage the information overload issues of ‘filter failure’ and ‘filter bubble.’)

4. I like the idea of using a ‘web log’ a.k.a. blog or wiki (using something like GoogleSites) as a library hub, helping teachers and students with information literacy and other relevant topics, as discussed by Maxwell (2019), and would seek to include this in the website of my future school / library context(s). I could also then share my blog posts or other library information via social media. Alfonzo (2019, p.33) suggests that libraries could use social media for communication and knowledge sharing, particularly reaching members of the community who might not know about the information sources otherwise.

5. I also feel that student blogging is a great idea, having done it for myself for two years as part of this degree, I am so glad, looking back that I’ve maintained my learning and have a way of reminding myself or others about key information science issues and learning. Maxwell (2019) suggests that student blogging, when monitored and done safely and effectively, can improve student literacy skills, global connections, sharing perspectives and links for families to view their children’s progress. I also like the idea of student wikis using GoogleSites, suggested as offering better understanding of the writing process for students (Stoddart, Chan & Liu, 2016).

[I also like the idea of having a staff wiki. Currently, staff communicate via Sentral but have their own teaching programs and classroom strategies. These would be much better coordinated by a wiki or maybe GoogleSites?]

6. Promoting and advocating the library blog (&/or wiki) and the library on the context’s selected social media and intra-net platforms (i.e. using ‘micro blogs‘ / tweets) is a whole new concept for me. [Personally, I dislike Twitter, and indeed, the whole concept of word limits – if I’m honest! 280 characters or less? No thanks! I prefer the motto ‘why use 1 word when 20 will do!’] However, I like the idea of Mentionapp as an analytic tool for hashtags (although I had to set up a professional twitter account to use it and that turned out to be a bit of a hassle). I can also see the benefit of having live updates via a Twitter feed in times of hardship, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as proven by Alajmi & Albudaiwi (2020). I am just not sure if I want to be the one responsible for it… Alfonzo (2019, p.35) recommends these things to ensure ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO) and that is to use a business profile, use the same @handle across all accounts and link the accounts wherever possible (eg. Instagram links to Facebook), have an engaging profile picture (and for situations where teachers don’t want to use their own pictures they can use a Bitmoji), using the whole library name (in my case, ‘Teachers Who Know Me’ as I don’t work in a library yet) as the account names, @symbols and #hashtags, having a library mission statement and contact details in the description or bio, add categories and story highlights wherever the application allows, and use the free analytics some social media networks offer.

7. Roadblocks and concerns abound! Not only am I concerned about the physical, financial and well-being cyber safety of young or naive social media users, I am also concerned about which members of the community social media does NOT reach or whose views are being privileged (based on the user demographics). I have concerns as well about the increased workload (and budgetary expense) of maintaining a digital learning environment – including social media platforms. Furthermore, the fears and issues around change leadership that may arise when introducing innovation in a workplace (which may or may not have a community of practice work culture). I myself am reluctant to use Twitter with any level of skill or benefit to the context and I consider myself fairly tech savvy (so, I can only imagine how someone less tech savvy might feel at being forced to use these platforms) and training and development will surely be required if the platforms are to be of any success… Thus, I read Vanscoy, Hicks & Cavanagh (2018) with the hopes that they would offer some insight into how to manage these roadblocks.

References

Alajmi, B. M., & Albudaiwi, D. (2020). Response to COVID-19 pandemic: Where do public libraries stand? Public Library Quarterly, 1-17.

Alfonzo, P. (2019). Instagram in the library. Library Technology Reports, 55(2), 33-42.

Komljenovic, J. (2019). Linkedin, platforming labour, and the new employability mandate for universities. Globalisation, Societies and Education. 17:1, 28-43. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2018.1500275

Maxwell, L. (2019). A librarian’s journey in blogging. Library Technology Reports, 55(5), 21-24.

Shakya, H.B., Christakis, N.A. (2017). Association of Facebook use with compromised well-being: a longitudinal study. American Journal of Epidemiology. 185(3). 203–211. doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1093/aje/kww189

Statista (2020). Global social networks ranked by number of users 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

Stoddart, A., Chan, J. Y-Y., & Liu, G-Z. (2016). Enhancing successful outcomes of wiki-based collaborative writing: a state-of-the-art review of facilitation frameworks. Interactive Learning Environments. 24:1, 142-157. doi: 10.1080/10494820.2013.825810

Vanscoy, A., Hicks, D., & Cavanagh, M. (2018). Understanding public libraries’ conversations: Promises and challenges of microblogging data. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS/Actes du congrès annuel de l’ACSI.

Information and society – Reflection on INF506 Module 2

Venn diagram - C. Roe — Cultural overlap Venn diagram by Christy Roe

OLJ Task 2: The influence of technology on society or OLJ Task 3: Reflections on the impact of change

To be or not to be (active on social media) is no longer the question

If we want ‘customer-driven, socially rich, and collaborative model of service and content delivery’ (module 2) then we must stop asking ‘why’ or ‘when’ and start asking ‘how.’

Why do we expect teachers to have a work culture aiming for a ‘community of practice’ (which I’ve discussed at length in previous blog posts, but also mentioned by Nisar, Prabhakar, G & Strakova, 2019), however, conversely, we expect students work almost entirely independently? Today’s working society has shifted, and so too has kid culture. Just as work places are becoming communities of practice, 21st century students have a participatory culture (also discussed in previous blog posts).

Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison & Weigel (2006, p.3) define a participatory culture as: “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novice. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least they care what other people thing about what they have created).”

According to Jenkins (et al., 2006), forms of participatory culture could include affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving and circulations [“Affiliations – memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centred around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, meta-gaming , came clans or MySpace); Expressions – producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan video-making, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups); Collaborative Problem-solving – working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gamine, spoiling); or Circulations – shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).”]

Artega (2012, p.72) writes, “social media extends the social milieu to the digital sphere where opportunities for global social participatory learning are plentiful.” Thus, to be viable in today’s globally connected society, particularly in western civilisation where a participatory culture has become the ‘norm,’ an educational facility’s social media presence is not only something that is necessary, but is something that must be done effectively.

“For library managers, questions are moving beyond how to initiate and launch social media to the more challenging problem of how to do social media well— how to better integrate social media into the life of the library, how to more fully engage the library’s staff and users in social media; how to make the library’s social media more effective in outreach and delivery of services, and how to measure the library’s presence and activities within social media in ways that truly matter. The next wave of trends in social media use are also always looming on the horizon— what will be the next big social site where users will be going next within the social media landscape, and should the library follow?” (Mon, 2014, p.51).

Some purposes for social media have been suggested by Mon (2014, p.24) as supported by the research of AlAwadhi (2019) to include: increased avenues for feedback from users, promotion and advocacy of the school &/or library, improved information access through outreach programs, deliverable educational or support hubs, improved collections and stronger or more frequent global collaborations. Notably, Kwon’s (2020) research places building trust ahead of information motivation as a reason for use of community social media platforms.

Roadblocks to consider

While reading Adner & Kapoor (2016) it occurred to me that, like all change processes, there will be roadblocks. This includes access to technology (either because of infrastructure, financial or intellectual constraints), as well as resistance to change from staff or families who are either change fatigued or stuck in the web1.0 mentalities. Perhaps there are issues around work-life balance, either for adults (addicted to screens and social media or overwhelmed by the need to take work home or have work cross over into the social sphere) or children (similarly addicted to screen time). These will all need to be considered in the 4 phases of creating a group digital presence or organisation’s digital learning environment (discussed at length in previous blog posts).

There is also the issue of needing to be innovative in the types of platforms that we promote as educators (as supported by the research of Manca (2020). Which brings up another roadblock to implementing social media for schools is the fact that there is an age limit for access – most students in K-6 Australian educational settings are below the age of 13 and cannot be encouraged by educators to look at nor participate in most social media applications. This means we have to tailor our content to an older demographic and seek out other (less public) social media platforms for younger students.

Some additional roadblocks or things to consider have been provided by Business.gov.au (2019) and they are to have a clear social media strategy, be mindful that additional staff or resources may be required for daily monitoring of all online platforms, be prepared for inappropriate behaviour (bullying, harassment, negative feedback, misleading or false claims, copyright infringement, information leaks or hacking) and have an action plan ready within your policy documents detailing specifically how to deal with these instances prior to launch date(s).

Hicks, Cavanagh & VanScoy (2020) recommend monitoring a library’s online presence via a ‘social network analysis (SNA).’ The SNA is a ‘theoretical framework and quantitatively oriented methodology’ for libraries to understand their ‘big data stories’ or connections with their community identifying relevant patterns and relationships among individuals, groups, or organisations over a specified period of time.

All of these issues need to be incorporated into the digital learning environment creation plan, a four phase process that I’ve detailed in a previous blog post from Digital Citizenship, but that can best be summarised in this infographic:

Digital citizenship phases infographic Image — Digital citizenship implementation phases (Infographic) by Christy Roe

How to design a platform and design it well, improving engagement (web 2.0)

This leads to the next issue – how to have a website (web 1.0), that is interactive (web 2.0) and makes the step towards linking the online world to the offline world (web 3.0). We need to be thinking beyond web 1.0 in terms of having a simple ‘face’ website that offers little to no interaction and does not enable, encourage (nor monitor) engagement but a platform, website and social media presence that actively engages our users. The web 2.0 model of ‘likes’ is also becoming an outdated model and with web 3.0 we must begin to think of our digital presence as fully interactive, including building meaningful ongoing connections (Barnhart, 2020).

But each context must first ask “what does it mean to have ‘engaged users?” and “what platforms / website / social media should we use to engage them?”

(‘How marketers define engagement when measuring social success’ images hyperlinked; Barnhart, 2020).

After my practical work-placement in a local public library, where I completed two weeks of ‘virtual’ research on website design (offering several recommendations for website development for the library), I realise that there are almost infinite resources, research and opinions on how to design effective websites. I don’t believe that my understanding of moving from the web presence currently (as web 1.0) to web 2.0 (more interactivity) to even web 3.0 (content creation by the users) was fully developed, until I watched the video provided in module 2 of INF506 (Schwerdtfeger, 2013). I wish I had been able to communicate this idea previously.

Yet, one key article that I did find, in the interest of brevity, was Garett, Chiu, Zhang & Young’s (2016, p.1) literature review on website design in terms of user engagement. Their 4 notable findings were:

“Websites have become the most important connection to the public and using social media links on websites may increase user engagement;
Proper website design is critical for user engagement, because poorly designed websites result in a higher user ‘bounce’ rate (users do not proceed past the home page) whereas, well designed websites encourage user exploration and revisit rates;
The International Standardised Organisation (ISO) (in Garett, et al., 2016, p.1) defines website ‘usability’ as: “the extent to which users can achieve desired tasks (e.g., access desired information or place a purchase) with effectiveness (completeness and accuracy of the task), efficiency (time spent on the task), and satisfaction (user experience) within a system”;
Out of the 20 identified design elements that impact user engagement, 7 key design elements (in order of importance) are navigation, graphical representation, organisation, content utility, purpose, simplicity and readability.” Garett et al. expand these design element definitions, but the key words are:

- Effective navigation: consistent menu/navigation bars, search features, multiple pathways and limited clicks/backtracking.
- Engaging graphical presentation: images, size and resolution, multimedia, font, font colour and size, logos, visual layout, colour schemes, and effective use of white space.
- Optimal organisation: logical, understandable, and hierarchical / architectural structure, arrangement / categorisation, and meaningful labels/headings/titles/keywords.
- Content utility: information is sufficient, of ongoing quality and relevant
- Clear purpose: 1) establishes a unique and visible brand/identity, 2) addresses visitors’ intended purpose and expectations for visiting the site, and 3) provides information about the organisation and/or services.
- Simplicity: clear subject headings, transparency, optimised size, uncluttered, consistent, easy, minimally redundant and understandable.
- Readability: easy, well-written, grammatically correct, understandable, brief, and appropriate.

References

Adner, R., & Kapoor, R. (2016). Right tech, wrong time. Harvard Business Review, 94(11), 60-67.

AlAwadhi, S. (2019). Marketing academic library information services using social media. Library Management, 40(3/4), 228-239. doi:10.1108/LM-12-2017-0132

Arteaga, S. (2012). Self-Directed and transforming outlier classroom teachers as global connectors in experiential learning. (Ph.D.), Walden University. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/docview/1267825419/BD063751849440E5PQ/1?accountid=10344

Barnhart, B. (2020, January 5). The most important social media trends to know for 2020. [Blog post]. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-trends/

Business.gov.au (2019). Social media for business. https://www.business.gov.au/Marketing/Online-presence/Social-media-for-business

Garett, R., Chiu, J., Zhang, L., & Young, S. D. (2016). A literature review: website design and user engagement. Online journal of communication and media technologies, 6(3), 1.

Hicks, D., Cavanagh, M. F., & VanScoy, A. (2020). Social network analysis: A methodological approach for understanding public libraries and their communities. Library & Information Science Research, 42(3), 101029. doi: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2020.101029

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture. https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Kwon, K. H., Shao, C., & Nah, S. (2020). Localized social media and civic life: Motivations, trust, and civic participation in local community contexts. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 1-15.

Manca, S. (2020). Snapping, pinning, liking or texting: Investigating social media in higher education beyond Facebook. The Internet and Higher Education, 44, 100707. doi: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2019.100707

Mon, L. (2014). Social Media and Library Services. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=2010483.

Nisar, T. M., Prabhakar, G., & Strakova, L. (2019). Social media information benefits, knowledge management and smart organizations. Journal of Business Research, 94, 264-272. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.05.005

Schwerdtfeger, P. [Patrick Schwerdtfeger] (2013). What is web 2.0? What is social media? What comes next? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iStkxcK6_vY

Van Dijck, J. (2018). Introduction. In J. Van Dijck (Ed.), The Platform Society. Retrieved from Oxford Scolarship Online.