Summary
Social media knowledge and literacy are skills for the networked 21st century information society. Business and industry increasingly require employees who are able to understand and communicate effectively with customers through social media. Knowledge of the uses of social media and applications is therefore increasingly becoming a recognised employability skill. As a result there is arguably an increasing requirement for modern educators to provide knowledge, insight and skills in this field.
Through its interactivity, the application of social media in education has the potential to engage students much more collectively than they might have experienced in the past. Such services can be the tools around which effective learning communities are created, both face-to-face and online. Yet the dangers of distraction from learning and a shallowness of learning and communication also exist.
With the recent rise in subscriptions to social media services globally, it appears that incoming students are already using such technology effectively to collaborate and interact with others in their personal webspace . The core skills of the ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) coming in to education simply need to be re-directed to collaborative activities within the educational field. They need to be taught differently. Indeed, one might argue that such learning activities in social learning environments or communities of inquiry (Garrison, 2006) will become an expectation and widespread within the educational field in the networked society.