We notice more and more articles appearing that talk about education and social media, like this one last week in the Washington Post about twittering professors.  So, we continue this theme with a post by Ashley and Jim.  Take a look.

-Jim and Shwen

 

 

Engagement as an Invaluable Education Tool: A Lesson from Social Media

 

Ashley Stempel’10 and Jim Stellar

 

There is something to be said about social media and its ability to get people to act. There are aspects to social media, like we talked about in our last post (on 6/12), that traditional media do not have. I feel like it revolves around the capacity for ownership, and the need to feel involved on a deeper level. Perhaps once people can author a blog post or respond to a news article they feel a sense of ownership to it. There are those who want to lead their own conversation, or want to discover something all on their own and then share it with the masses, making them feel important. Maybe we should consider which characteristics are important to human emotion, etc, and then see how social media address them better than traditional media. This could answer why the use of social media is on the rise.

 

That ownership is what I see as engagement, just like the engagement that comes from experiential education. You did three six-month cooperative education experiences that got you engaged with your career development in a way that has sparked our conversations. On the other hand, when I was in college so long ago, it was like high school without my parents. I was a good kid and did well in my major, but I never thought about the larger implications. I remained pre-med largely because I was (to reverse-quote Henry David Thoreau) “living the unexamined life.”  I became engaged only when I worked in a lab my junior/senior summer and set my sights on getting into graduate school for what we refer to today as neuroscience. It is the engagement from comes from being an owner that I think matters.

 

An underlying theme between both media and education is the power of communication. Both media entities and the classroom create and promote an atmosphere in which the primary function is the communication of news, ideas, and other information between groups of people. But what social media and experiential education do, in comparison with traditional media and education, is add a level of engagement that empowers the individual through the ownership. Not only does the technology associated with social media expand that communication to a larger and more diverse sample of participants, but it gives people the chance to voice their opinion and let their thoughts be read. And with experiential education, not only are students learning about the world and their career path, but they actually have the chance to live it. Through social media and experiential education engagement is encouraged, if not required. Social media allows for me to have a real-time conversation on Twitter with a man in London, while experiential education permits me the chance to work in a meeting with the President of a biopharmaceutical company. Both situations require interaction from both parties, of who would typically never before link-up with one another.

 

So how do you see this as applying to experiential education?

 

Experiential education seems to have the same effect within a person as social media does on a society. Both social media and experiential education promote the fusion and ownership of ideas across some form of barrier; whether global distance, age, or status. Social media gives people the opportunity to become engaged in a conversation, and during my co-ops at Northeastern, not only was I engaged in the career conversation, learning tools that will eventually help me land a career post-graduation, but I saw myself becoming more and more engaged with the conversation about the direction of my life as a whole. I was learning from leaders and experiences, not through textbooks and lectures. I took more ownership of my future after living the experiences, rather than hearing about them from other people, just like you took ownership of your own future once working in a lab atmosphere.

 

The obvious goal of an experiential education program is to develop a career, but the underlying accomplishment is to truly understand, or begin to understand, yourself as a student, a friend, a professional, a son/daughter, simply (but not really so simple a task) as someone who is coexisting with the multitudes of other people in the world. The key component in experiential education is the experience. This type of learning finally acknowledges that we as human beings MUST be given the chance to develop entirely as people, internally as well as career-wise.

 

I totally agree about the career, and especially with the idea that the best careers are developed by developing the person. That is best done by “Educating the Whole Student” as we wrote about in an early blog post – To “educate the whole student” classical academic education must be combined with experiences. But the question again remains why. One factor could simply be the connection, as you emphasize above. Networking is always good, but there is something about the experience and the engagement that is really interesting. A recent article in Science, “On Becoming Modern” by Ruth Mace, suggested that our human history may have really blossomed once we started living in groups large enough to foster the sharing of innovations made by individuals in the group, rather than letting these progressions die out. The article also pointed out that when different groups interacted, they could have traded ideas/innovations. All of this implies that humans are built to engage with each other for the purposes of our own group (and perhaps individual) development.  Although this is not a new concept, I find it powerful that it may also underlay our cultural evolution.  My point is that it is the potential for a human experience that really engages, and to go back to our recent post, human experience can easily occur on social media if you think of it in a positive way.  I also think that a lot of how we interact in groups involves those limbic brain areas and the logic circuits within that we have referred to here as “The Other Lobe of the Brain.”

 

Again, enough from us … let’s hear from you readers.  Does the important part of experience as we wrote about it boil down to engagement?  Is that key to why social media can be so powerful?