This trend is also receiving prominence in research literature. According to Rosen (2017), a typical student actively engages in six types of social media several times a day due to the fear of missing out and/or the constant temptation of keeping up with others in their social networks. The questionnaire's results demonstrate that 100% of students indicated that they have been using their smartphones during classes for non-educational purposes with varying degrees of regularity: sometimes—15%; quite often—50%; almost always—35%; with almost all respondents (85%) using Facebook during classes. It is interesting to note that only 11% of respondents indicated that using smartphones during classes is unacceptable, whereas 61.5% of respondents believe that using smartphones in the classroom is a new reality of the contemporary learning environment and hence, where educators fail to incorporate smartphones for educational use, they would be used for other purposes.

The influence of Facebook specifically extends beyond being a mere distraction in the classroom. Since group space within Blackboard's discussion forum, one of the dominant learning management systems in HE institutions, is not popular due to its limited functionality, the majority of participating students prefer to form a group file exchange and communication environment in Facebook.

Facebook is a useful tool for group work however it was rare for me to make use of this during a lecture. My use of social media during lectures has definitely more to do with boredom or communicating with my friends, both in the lecture and outside the university. (R3)

Unlike social media, most learning management systems place greater emphasis on a formal curriculum than on the 'networking' element of social media (Cho and Cho, 2014). Therefore Facebook has filled this gap. Social media allows students to collaborate informally, and instrumental support from Facebook friends is found to have a positive impact on the learning process (Khan et al., 2014). 84% of respondents indicated that they prefer to use Facebook for group-work activities, and that raises questions about the effectiveness of learning management systems and investment in them by HE institutions.

#### Entertainment

Another common aspect of social media that was indicated by all participants is the immediate and often entertaining content available online: games, music, video and sharing of amusing textual and multimedia content.

social media was used relatively often as a form of entertainment between my friendship group within lectures and content was shared between us […] because there is plenty of interesting stuff there… (R12)

While the students do not commonly use social media for this purpose in tutorials or seminars because of '*respect for the tutor*' (R1), they might certainly do so in lectures, especially in large classes, as a way of dealing with boredom. Responding to the perceived monotony of lectures, students tend to improvise a short break to re-energise their focus on the lecture's content. This self-administered brief pause in a form of 'disconnect from class' or 'technological break' (Aagaard, 2015) is typically filled with surfing the web or checking on social media news or shared gags.

I felt it was totally unacceptable to use a phone unless an emergency or for work in the context of a tutorial. I think there is a more personal connection in this setting than in a lecture and it would therefore be rude not to pay attention to the tutor. The underlying reason for this may be to do with morals instilled in me by my parents. Use of a mobile phone was always discouraged at the dinner table or in other more formal settings such as family/ friends visiting. (R4)

This view is supported by the majority of respondents, 69% do not mind using smartphones for entertainment purposes even during hour-long lectures as long as the lecture is deemed to be boring. This distribution of responses raises a number of questions, some rather controversial, regarding the need to make the delivery of the educational material as engaging as possible for all students. Is there a need for '*edutainment*' or for another type of radical change in higher education? What constitutes an engaging lecture in nursing, engineering, mathematics and other technical sciences? And there is a more enduring question concerning the essence of large-group teaching: are large groups intended to communicate content, or to be a learning opportunity of a new kind?

#### Educational Drift

The use of rapid-response applications to achieve more effective classroom engagement is becoming more common (Wang, 2015). These apps, such as Mentimeter or Socrative, enable tutors to connect with students to support their learning process, helping them to self-assess within the scope of prearranged activities and/or on-the-fly questions, and allowing tutors to gain an immediate insight into students' understanding of subject matter. They also encourage students to find out more about the information on slides provided in the apps.

The respondents seem to appreciate the use of response applications but are also mindful of their distracting potential:

I think that [it would be good to use] a system where everyone in the lecture has their device assigned to their name and the system can tell if an individual has not responded to a question (this may already exist in the apps mentioned as I am not familiar with them). (R2)

I think that allowing or encouraging fellow students to use social media would help alleviate the desire to a use smartphone in lectures and thus remove the 'mental itch' of not using the device for the duration of a lecture. (R11)

The above excerpts show students' awareness of the potentially distracting power of smart devices when used for learning and teaching in the classroom. However, around 85% of the questionnaire's respondents are in favour of using in-class response applications for the purpose of active participation in classroom activities.

#### Catch of Advertisement

Despite a general trend in which advertisements on web resources and social media are ignored by users, marketing campaigns have been evolving to become more sophisticated, entertaining, and informative. Students are therefore increasingly finding themselves in the situation of being carried away by the interest of the moment, triggered by clever advertisements, particularly on the Pinterest platform.

When I go on Pinterest I almost always follow prompts and pop-ups as they are so creative and I'm getting a lot of ideas for my work [as a marketeer]. (R10)

Sometimes I would have to watch a snippet in order to get to the content I had chosen to watch and even forgot my original purpose for browsing. (R6)

According to the respondents, Pinterest is an effective platform in capturing their attention because it sends visual information (compilations of examples) to the registered users matching their interests. It sends these compilations every day, typically in two ways: as notifications to smartphones and as emails with a focused summary centred on users' interests. As a result, during the interview participants agreed that Pinterest is more interesting and effective in keeping attention of its users compared with Facebook, labelling it as 'captivating but addictive' (R1).

### Recommendations (for HE Practitioners)

The authors have used a number of teaching interventions for embedding smartphones into teaching and learning processes with the aim of counteracting perceived boredom in large-group sessions. These include, but are not limited to: mood-setting starters; conversational dialogues; using multimedia material; changing the routine of the session regularly; allowing for students' questions and feedback using technology; and alternative no- or low-tech strategies to engage students in a variety of ways. These interventions require the attentive participation of students in classroom activities to varying degrees of success, depending on stimuli that would fuel different aspects of students' interest in learning as well as their curiosity and imagination. The use of rapid response systems, such as Mentimeter and Socrative, appears to be one of the most effective interventions in utilising for educational purposes the urge many students have to use their smartphones in the classroom. This suggestion is based on a personal observation that students normally respond to an invitation to use their smart devices for classroom activities quite enthusiastically.

Typically, such an activity can be organised in three steps. Initially, students are invited to use Mentimeter or Socrative to register their views in a tailor-made mini-quiz on a particular subject discussed in the lecture or tutorial. After the quiz, a sequence of browsing tasks aimed to encourage the discovery of specific resources (e.g. published articles or proven working solutions) can be introduced to give students an opportunity to explore the concept- or subject-related resources. Lastly, the lecturer can point out to students how the quiz and subsequent browsing tasks relate to a specific threshold or advanced concept within the lecture or tutorial. This allows students' attention to return gradually to the main subject of the session.

Such an approach offers a variety of things for the student to focus on, thus maintaining their attention and helps to develop their research skills. In practice, it was noticed that at the end of browsing tasks students often do a quick check of their social connections anyway, but this habit seems to be fading with time. Overall, embedding smartphones in the class activities helps to change the perception of smartphone use as forbidden (by tutors) or as an inappropriate activity. Similarly, Wang (2015) has found that introducing new learning technology in the classroom results in a spike of enthusiasm from the students, and although this fades over time the students remain fairly engaged and motivated. The findings of this study also indicate that 81.4% of respondents would appreciate an opportunity to use in-class response applications as a form of active participation in classroom activities.

### Conclusions

This review of the use of smartphones by higher-education students has identified certain challenges academics have been facing recently. It was established within the scope of this small-scale study that all respondents have used and continue to use smartphones during classes to access social media platforms (mainly Facebook and Twitter), with more than 60% of questionnaire respondents believing that this is a new reality in higher education and their tutors should find ways of using it.

It would appear that despite the omnipresent use of smartphones to access social media platforms in the classroom, certain approaches for regaining students' attention may prove to be sufficiently effective. A proven practical example, supported by 85% of student responses, is the use of rapid-response applications, such as Mentimeter or Socrative, to invigorate the academic involvement of students in classroom activities by appealing to their habit of using smartphones.

While the choice of student engagement strategies is fairly broad, it rests on a few assumptions to be considered in further studies. First, academics should try to recognise the presence of smartphones in the classroom as a learning opportunity and attempt to integrate them into the teaching process. Second, a large number of student comments that express the desire to have interesting sessions indicates the challenges higher education faces: none of the participating students were able to specifically articulate the key characteristics of an interesting lecture. What might these be? Is it the perceived appeal of the subject material, or its delivery, or another combination of yet-to-be-rationalised factors?

### References

# 8. The Use of Social Media Tools and Their Application to Creative Students

*#Beginner #Snapchat #Facebook #Instagram #Pinterest #LCCBad*

*Serena Gossain*

### Introduction

In this chapter I shall explore the use of social media to support and increase student knowledge on a BA (Hons) Advertising course. The following analysis will explore whether students were more engaged with the visual learning because they also took part in the construction of that learning using social media apps. The study I will be discussing took place at the London College of Communication (part of University of Arts London), with the kind cooperation of the Programme team headed by Dr Paul Caplan and Steve Spence. It is a critical study into student engagement and learning, using social media to support and increase student knowledge of design and advertising, particularly for visual learning and understanding.

On this BA programme, we teach the concepts and practice of advertising, to students mainly of the so-called millennial generation (which is widely agreed to be the people born between 1981 and 2000). Some of the students are from an era that has never known life without

the Internet, apps, smartphones and all of their many benefits and distractions! Their generation are used to communicating far more widely and socially through their screens, via social media, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. They are very aware of their online presence and curate their own digital identity based on what they post, their preferences, likes and follows. With this in mind, the programme team decided to embed some of these social media platforms into their teaching to see if it helped with engagement, relevancy and even preference for their learning experience. As these tools were already familiar to the students, we were curious to see if they could adopt the new formats quickly and put them to work immediately.

This chapter will therefore focus on a new approach to teaching over one term, which incorporated social media tools, to determine whether their use enhanced the learning experience for students and assisted in their engagement with the subject of advertising. By focusing on the newly enrolled first-year BA(Hons) Advertising students at LCC, we could compare their learning and engagement with that of previous cohorts. This study was carried out from September 2017 until December 2017 at LCC and we introduced our own visual boards of Pinterest and Instagram pages. These two platforms provided the best visualisation and both are very familiar to, and popular with, many of our current students.

### Background to the Course

As this is an advertising course, knowledge is gained through observing, engaging, doing, reviewing and reiterating (though not always in this order!) Creative work can be chaotic at times, but advertising provides a framework for this sort of expression as it is channelled and framed by a strategic business problem that needs solving. It is not art for arts' sake (unless, of course, art is the product that needs selling). Rather, advertising is all about selling. If the advertising does not help to sell or somehow promote the brand in a positive light, then it simply is not working. The challenge is to create meaningful advertising that surprises and engages the consumer, whilst meeting the specific objectives of the client's brief. The student has to master many strategic and creative skills in order to be successful on the course and then to secure a job within this competitive industry. The students need to build their knowledge rapidly, to be able to learn all about the various aspects and nuances of advertising so that they have enough time to develop a portfolio of work to take to job interviews once they have graduated.

### Exploring the Related Learning Theories

The BA programme has been shaped and influenced by different theories of learning. A central learning theory that effects the design and curriculum on this course is the work of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) who created the foundations of Constructivist learning. Vygotsky's theory asserts three major themes regarding: social interaction; the more knowledgeable other; and the zone of proximal development.

In Vygotsky's time, many schools traditionally held a *transmissionist* or *instructionist* model in which a teacher or lecturer 'transmitted' information to students. In contrast, Vygotsky's theory promoted learning contexts in which students played an active part in learning. The roles of teacher and student therefore shifted, as a teacher collaborated with his or her students in order to help facilitate their construction of meaning, and learning could therefore become a reciprocal experience. Constructivism, then, is the theory that learners construct their own meaning through their own social and interactive experiences.

The Cognitive learning approach is one based on students being involved in learning through memory, insights and problem solving. This theory was developed from Gestalt psychology, which held that students become more intelligent through information processing and memory. Creating memories through their experience of these key attributes of successful advertising, does play a large role on the Advertising course. Through the memory recall of past advertising campaigns (through the Pinterest page for example), students are provided with useful frameworks and support in their own creative development.

The main theories that this course employs are Constructivist theory and Constructive alignment. Fry, Ketteridge and Marshall (2010) noted that the idea of Constructivism is based on *'continuous building and amending of structures in the mind that 'hold' knowledge.'* This is far more student-centred and allows students to construct their own learning — building on their own knowledge and reconstructing it to augment their own understanding. The Constructivist approach is also known as 'scaffolding', allowing us to build on a student's existing knowledge by supporting them as they increase their understanding and make their own connections.

In the context of the BA Advertising course, the Cognitive and Constructivist approaches are being employed through the use of Instagram, as the students continuously update and review their Instagram feeds. One could also state that by actively encouraging students to look at more advertising via the Pinterest page, *students are potentially learning more by seeing more.* And they may learn at a faster rate. Students are encouraged to discuss what they have seen and add their own examples, thereby building their own personalised learning structure.

Within teaching and learning theory, it is well known that a wide range of different learning experiences should be utilised to capture more student engagement. Novotney (2010) discussed how to engage with the typical undergraduate learner: 'New research suggests that offering variety may be the best way to engage today's undergraduates.'

Some of our students may be kinaesthetic learners, who learn by doing, while others may be auditory or visual learners. Students may utilise a combination of their senses to take in information, but each will have a preference for how they learn. In order to help our students learn, we need to include as many of these preferences as possible. With the inclusion of social media platforms, we have encouraged students to engage with their learning from a familiar and comfortable space that they would typically inhabit daily in their personal lives. As a programme team we still have the traditional lectures and workshops, but the emphasis is always on interaction and encouraging students to join in with debates and demonstrate their learning through 'crits,' in which students present their work for everyone to see and accept feedback from their tutors and peers. The whole process prepares the student for an industry in which they will have to persuade senior creative teams, and ultimately the clients, to buy into their advertising ideas. Therefore, the practice of showing and telling is very common in most of the units on the Advertising course. Social media gives students another voice for this showing and telling, and it can also help them to organise their thoughts.

Connectivist theory (Siemens 2005) also helps us to understand the digital forms of communication within the course. It describes a process of acquiring knowledge that is rooted in digital connections and social media. Greenhow and Lewin (2016) argue that being more knowledgeable can consist of: the ability to nurture, maintain, and traverse network connections; the ability to access and use specialized information sources just-in-time; and the 'capacity to know more' rather than the individual's ability to construct meaning from prior knowledge, or 'what is currently known' (Siemens 2005).

### The Study

At the beginning of the term the students were asked to create new Instagram accounts for their university work. These had to be completely separate from their personal ones. They were able to follow, respond and react to posts by tutors on the official LCC Bad Instagram page (See Fig. 8.1). Separately, within their own university Instagram accounts, the students were able to keep a visual record of their own work. They were required to use their accounts as digital sketchbooks, including captions as part of their reflective writing. As part of their summative assessments, the students had to use Instagram to showcase their thinking and creative work over the ten weeks of the course, whilst using the course hashtag to link their work back to the official page.

The work and the thought processes were then photographed and uploaded onto the site and the students used the hashtag #LCCBad so that their page would be linked to the official programme Instagram page. Currently, this is still live and the Instagram feed has 46 followers and 23 posts. All of our current Advertising students have their own university Instagram accounts, so there are approximately 300 users in total. Along with capturing their initial sketches, students also wrote captions as part of a reflective piece of work — therefore replacing their assessed short reflective essays with 10 to 12 entries of 25 words each. As formal essay writing is already a part of other units in the course, within the creative units the writing is kept to a minimum with a simple written reflection. This type of reflective writing is something that

Fig. 8.1 Serena Gossain, Screenshot of LCC Bad Instagram page (2018), CC BY 4.0

students often struggle with (since they have to switch from a more academic style of writing), but by including the reflective written work on Instagram, students were able to do this far more naturally, referring to their creative work there and then, as the weeks unfolded. This was also a more effective way for them to manage and speed up their work, and keep it organised in a weekly structure.

At the same time a Pinterest board (Fig. 8.2) was created and a large collection of ads were 'pinned' to the board for students to look at and comment on. At first it was set for private viewing only, but this proved difficult for students to view easily (because some students had not responded to the emailed invitation to follow the private board) so it was switched to public view. This allowed students (and members of the public) to view casually, without becoming followers.

Fig. 8.2 Serena Gossain, Screenshot of LCC Ads Pinterest board (2018), CC BY 4.0

The online visual board was continuously populated over the term, with many advertising campaigns — mainly print ads — which were either award-winning campaigns, political ads or interesting or inspirational visually or through the copy. Students could go to the board without 'following' it and look at the many examples easily. They were also invited by email to become contributors to the board and therefore to become active followers. The board is still active and public, although you cannot contribute to it unless you are personally invited by email. At the time of writing the board has 26 followers and 168 posts; the board is also viewed by many other students who, for whatever reason, have not chosen to become followers (perhaps because they did not want to log in to the site).

### The Results

After one complete term from September to December 2017, the newly introduced Pinterest and Instagram platforms were reflected upon. Was the introduction a success, what difficulties did we face and what could we improve upon to take us forward?

#### Pinterest

The Pinterest board was created with the idea that tutors and students could share advertising campaign examples with each other. The board provided a very useful visual resource and a resource for class discussion. It also provided a creative inspiration bank — helping students to become more aware of creative thinking, of the challenges of communicating a clear idea in an interesting way, of layout styles etc.

The Pinterest board has become a useful resource for the course; when working with students on creative briefs it is a good knowledge bank of ideas and styles that tutors and students can refer to, which help to frame the student's own creative work. The Pinterest board will hopefully continue to grow thanks to the addition of new 'pins'; if the department promoted it more actively it could increase its audience still further. Tutors could also utilise it more and populate the board with more examples, and students from all years could more actively contribute to the board too.

It has been evident that Pinterest has improved and enhanced students' learning, especially for those in their first year, enabling them rapidly to become more fluent in visual and verbal approaches to advertising. As well as providing a bank of ideas for inspiration, it allows students to see whether an idea can be taken further or be enhanced with a unique and challenging approach. It has definitely helped them to grasp the basics of visual communication and effective formulas of advertising.

This use of Pinterest follows a Constructivist approach, enabling students to build their own knowledge by actively taking part, applying what they have seen to actual practice. Even those who have chosen to remain passive viewers are still learning from the Cognitive aspects of observation and memory.

### Instagram

The adoption of Instagram to record student sketchbooks has been very interesting to observe. Students on most of the creative modules have physical sketchbooks/layout pads that they use to capture their ideas for ads, mind maps, and scamps (sketches of ads).

 The use of Instagram had a number of benefits. It became an online 'sketchbook' of student work as part of their formal assessment, a practice that was eventually adopted throughout all the year groups. The students could add to their profile and reflect on their work in a digital format, allowing them to include video, links and their own photos of their work, including their physical sketchbooks/layout pads. This followed both a Constructivist and a Connectivist model of learning. Instagram was also used to circulate news material — for example, information about special events and guest lectures — and it acted as a showcase for excellent student work. In this way, it provided a platform for the course to market itself to the wider world.

The Instagram platform also allowed students the opportunity to include other creative work **—** finished ads, website links, videos, and animations. In essence this experience has been helpful to ensure students are organising their work and therefore their process, which is helpful preparation for building their final portfolios in the second and third year.

Connectivist theory has also been adopted through the use of Instagram, as students are able to share, review and develop their own work in progress as the weeks go by. Siemens (2004) stated that the starting point of Connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to the individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed. Connectivism therefore provides insights into learning skills and tasks for learners to flourish in a digital era.

Nowadays, most portfolios are created on a digital platform so this study has been a useful exercise in learning how to present and share work within a popular and familiar social media platform. Students appear to be very engaged with the platforms that have been introduced and have responded well to using Instagram as a vital part of their final assessments.

### Conclusion

The addition of the two social media platforms to the Advertising course has overall been beneficial and they have been adopted quite naturally.

The introduction of Instagram was a completely natural evolution by the Programme team, given the digital nature of the advertising industry. The students have been, and are currently, engaging very well with it and it is a helpful tool to organise their work and show the stories behind the final projects they create. There are some areas in which students could be a little more active — perhaps in commenting on the official LCC Bad Instagram posts or 'liking' them. As far as the tutors are concerned, more frequent and varied posts by the students would be a good way to keep the feed fresh and up to date. The use of Instagram as part of the assessment process has also been very successful — mainly as the students did not have a choice here to use anything else! Since it was mandatory, students used Instagram to organise their work well and learned how to communicate ideas clearly from a familiar platform.

The introduction of a specific advertising Pinterest board has been helpful for giving the students ideas and as a useful backdrop for discussion or data points. It will continue to grow as a visual knowledge bank. In future, students need to be encouraged to add their own contributions and also to follow the board. Tutors should also add more examples to the board so that a wider variety of work is shown. From the experience gained last term, it seems that more would be made of the Pinterest board if students are required to follow it, and to contribute at least a few pins.

In comparison to previous first years who did not use these platforms as part of their studies, the platforms have definitely had an impact on this first-year group, enhancing their rapidly growing knowledge of, and curiosity about the world of advertising. The Pinterest board acts as a guide for good practice and it has been noted by the tutors that subsequent first-year-student output has become fairly sophisticated, relatively quickly, as a result.

Given that students use social media in their social lives and as part of their 'down time' there is some bridging that needs to be addressed to bring these platforms to the fore in an educational environment. Greenhow and Lewin (2016) summarised this in their study of formal and informal learning through the integration of social media:

Others argue that only a small proportion of young people are actually using social media in sophisticated ways that educators might value (Eynon and Malmberg, 2011). Complicating this tension, there is a lack of current models that theorize social media as a space for informal learning. There is also considerable debate about the benefits and challenges of appropriating technologies (e.g., social media) in everyday use for learning and little exploration of the connections between formal, non-formal, and informal learning such technologies might facilitate.

However, one could argue that social media could provide a more rounded and holistic approach to our students' learning experience, if its capabilities are better understood and if we are prepared to make more responsive changes to our courses.

Technology has the potential to disrupt the boundaries between sites where learning takes place. It can empower learners through greater agency, opportunities to participate in networked communities and access to a wide range of resources to support knowledge building and collaboration. There seems little doubt that engagement with digital cultures offers potential for self-directed or spontaneous learning opportunities of varying degrees. (Greenhow and Lewin, 2016)

On final reflection, the ways in which we can continuously review and respond to the ways in which students are choosing to learn is probably one of the biggest things we have learned from this study. Having experienced how students adopted the new platforms, some valuable insights and learning have been gained. Traditional oneway instructional teaching is not and never will be a part of a creative education, so the adoption of social media platforms has definitely found a place as it helps to address and support many of the learning objectives we aim to fulfil as tutors. As the advertising industry has evolved over the last twenty years to use various digital platforms alongside traditional media, it is also imperative that the course remains completely connected and related to this. When social media platforms in the future morph into another communication format (as they definitely will!) it is critical that the course should reflect the industry symbiotically while also actively engaging with it. There is certainly much more to do, but this has been a really interesting start, with some positive results.

### References

# 9. Role of Social Media in Learning: Benefits and Drawbacks — How Social Presence Theory Explains Conflicting Findings

*#Intermediate #Facebook*

*Paul Kawachi*

### Introduction

Social media can play an important role in education. Its role in creating trust within a group is of particular importance. The face-to-face element in online education may be achieved physically in a classroom, or it can involve a social media platform which features a clear photograph of the student's face. One purpose for the photo is to establish trust among the participants — just as witnesses must appear physically inside a courtroom to take an oath and give evidence. In this sense, where there exists no photograph on a social media website of the participant, or where the face is unclear or hidden in an image, the formation of trust may be impeded. A photograph is usually trusted since it is presumed that the physical person attended the place to get the photograph taken (although photo technology has eroded this somewhat). Likewise, a person may physically present himself at a faraway courtroom and use telephone or video technology to transfer trust to the required courtroom remotely.

Social media provides the mechanics for conveying and constructing Social Presence. The shy introvert student can look through the webpages of other students, and then tentatively post their own personal information; this or that photograph, these 'likes' and those music favourites. Personal data can be posted gradually on a trial-and-error basis to explore how acceptable the data is to others (and immediately withdrawn if sensed to be outside the social norms of the group). In small safe steps, the introvert can thereby build up a socially-accepted online persona, through which she can interact with others online. In this way, the social media website can offer to the self-conscious outsider a mechanism towards becoming accepted by the community online. Once this has been achieved the group can move on together as a community and engage in collaborative learning tasks.

The Transactional Distance Model — a four-stage Kolb-like cycle — can serve as a practical scaffold onto which Social Presence Theory can be positioned. The resulting model can then be used to explain why some empirical studies show that Facebook is associated with better quality learning, while other studies show the opposite. It is useful to understand Transactional Distance and Social Presence here, and a brief introduction to each is covered in turn in the 'Methods' Section, before looking at how well they explain the findings on social media in the next 'Results' Section.

Social Presence through social media plays a supportive nonacademic role in the early stages of the course to reduce anxiety and ease the student into the academic forum of ideas. However, one study has found the social aspects can be detrimental towards future learning (Cunningham, Corprew and Becker, 2009). Moreover, in an online environment using multimedia, Herrington and Oliver (1999) have found much less lower-order discussion and less social chat were correlated with more achieved learning. Additionally in an objective controlled study, Boling and Robinson (1999) found that there was some considerable trade-off (an inverse correlation) between distance students' satisfaction with social aspects of the course and the actual quality of learning achieved.

Tutors as well as the students themselves should be aware of the effectiveness of Social Presence and its implications for the initial stage of the learning process. Social Presence integrates the outsider into the target community, and there serves to reduce anxiety. In an extensive study, the number of forum postings, according to data from 3600 courses over 545 colleges reported by Young (2012), was 25 per term after self-introductions were required and posted, and only 9.5 per term where no self-introductions were made. A lack in student engagement has been attributed by Herrington, Reeves and Oliver (2006) to de-contextualisation. They argue that the student's own perspectives must be brought in and Social Presence should be established early on for the group to take on collaborative learning tasks later as a team. Thus, there is a meaningful role for Facebook and other social media in education, but this is limited to within only the initial early stage.

The correlation between social media and lower achieved learning is not yet determined as causative; in the ensuing confusion, some supporters of social media suggest that those who are weaker academically and who do not put in time and effort into studying tend to spend more of their free time on Facebook and other socialising.

### Methods

There are now more than 23 expressions using 'presence' in the published literature related to online distance education. These include social presence (author), institutional presence, teacher or instructor presence (Bouras, 2009), teaching presence, student or learner presence (Bouras, 2009), co-presence (Garau et al., 2005), learning presence (Shea and Bidjerano, 2010), cognitive presence (Garrison et al., 2000), transactional presence (Shin, 2002), virtual presence, online presence, Internet presence, telepresence, web presence, inverse presence (Timmins and Lombard, 2005), physical presence (Lee et al., 2010), mediated presence (Sood and Nevejan, 2012), emotional presence (Campbell and Cleveland-Innes, 2005), witnessed presence (Sood and Nevejan, 2012), natural presence (Sood and Nevejan, 2012), self presence (Lee et al., 2010; Jin, 2011), and absent presence (Gergen, 2002; Rosen, 2004). Many authors do not distinguish among these and refer merely to presence (for example see Waterworth and Waterworth, 2006). More than half of these were explored and discussed previously by Kawachi (2011). Only six of these expressions are discovered to be essential to the learning process: institutional presence, learner presence, social presence, cognitive presence, transactional presence, and teaching presence, are all positioned in a specific sequence on a scaffold framework of the learning process, based on the transactional distance model.

The need for Social Presence is well recognised in online education — even in conventional face-to-face contiguous education, an online presence is considered by students to be an essential part of being an accepted group member. Facebook and other social media—including instant connectivity through Twitter, Instagram, Chat and other software applications — are currently used by almost all students, as well as by teachers and their institutions. The college administration may use Facebook to publicise itself to reach prospective future students, to announce events, awards, and even employment vacancies. Teachers may use it to rally students and to publicise lessons in a media that is familiar to their students, while students themselves may use it to share experiences with each other from both inside and outside the classroom. In all cases, social media acts to establish and foster connectivity in the education world. The problems begin to surface when the cooperative exchanges on social media fail to give way to academic collaboration.

The Transactional Distance Model developed in online distance education, and Social Presence Theory, offer a rational explanation for the conflicting data on the use of Facebook and other social media in education. Both of these are related to and underpinned by Otto Peters' Transactional Distance Theory, Peter Grogono's Conversation Theory and Diane Laurillard's Conversation Model, George Siemens' Connectivism Theory, and Social Presence Theory. Briefly, the Transactional Distance Model (involving imposed Structure S and educative Dialogue D — shown in Fig. 9.1 below) sets out four stages in a learning cycle — first, a cooperative sharing stage; second, a collaborative rationalisation; third, a collaborative disjunctive reasoning stage; all followed by a cooperative experiential testing-out stage.

In Stage 1, learning occurs in a group cooperatively, gathering and sharing information and fostering a learning community. Here synchronous-mode computer-mediated communications are best such as chat and conferencing. This Stage 1 can be characterised by self-introductions, brain-storming new ideas, divergent thinking, and helping each other with projecting content, especially in sharing personal experiences and past literature. The transactional distance initially is at a maximum (S- D-) with no imposed structure and no educative dialogue.

Fig. 9.1 Paul Kawachi, The four stages of the Transactional Distance Model (2018), CC BY 4.0

In Stage 2, lateral thinking (creative thinking around the problem) is used to generate and develop metaphors (an idea or conception that is basically dissimilar but formed from noting similarities between the initial information and the new concept) or new ideas, and support these by argument. For example, students may discuss their own problem they have found which has brought them to participate in the current course, and then argue to identify possible solutions to each other's problems. Creative thinking here may derive from combining seemingly disparate parts, especially ideas contributed from others in different contexts, into a new synergic whole. The teacher, in their academic capacity, is still keeping at a distance from the content under discussion, while the students are making efforts to achieve some pre-set goal (to present their own problem and their reasons for engaging the current course, for example) which gives structure to their discussions (S+D-). Some time is needed for reflection here, and asynchronous modes such as email and a bulletin board are effective.

In Stage 3, the tutor engages the students with guiding comments in what Holmberg (1983) has described as a guided didactic conversation, helping the students achieve the structural requirements of understanding the general concepts to be learnt (S+ D+). The tutor poses questions and students defend their formulations. This Stage 3 is characterised by hypothesis-testing and logical thinking (termed 'vertical' thinking in contrast to 'lateral' thinking) associated with problem-solving, and is collaborative. The asynchronous mode is ideal here, to allow sufficient time for cognitive connections and the co-construction of new non-foundational knowledge.

In Stage 4, the final stage, the course requirements have largely been already achieved and there is no structure left, except to disseminate the achieved mental ideas and test them out in real-life. This Stage 4 is characterised by experiential learning and is cooperative, and conducted at minimum transactional distance (S- D+), in synchronous mode, with no imposed structure and with educative dialogue to assist the student to reflect on her studies.

These four stages of the Transactional Distance Model are summarised and shown in Figure 9.2 Stage 1 (S- D-) is at maximum transactional distance for the student; Stage 2 (S+ D-) is closer, as the student engages institutionally imposed structure; Stage 3 (S+ D+) is nearer to achieving the learning task, when some educative dialogue is now involved to help the student consider all possible alternatives; and Stage 4 is closest at minimum transactional distance where the student has adopted new knowledge and is testing this out to finally learn.

Findings from a meta-analysis of telepresence for education can be easily visualized using this four-stage model as a framework showing the learning process.

Social Presence Theory draws from a meta-analysis of virtual presence in education that suggests only six forms of presence are essential and occur in turn, purposefully within the educative process — (1) Institutional Presence, (2) Learner Presence, (3) Cognitive Presence, (4) Social Presence, (5) Transactional Presence, and (6) Teaching Presence. The six forms of presence are positioned (shown in Fig. 9.2 below) accordingly within the four-stage Transactional Distance Model process to facilitate learning.

The lines in Figure 9.2 try to show the coverage of each form of Presence occurring throughout the four Stages of learning. Institutional Presence covers the top of the learning process including the Teaching Presence, but not totally enveloping the student who may have extrinsic activities and use non-academic support facilities including family support — so the institutional support along the top of this diagram

Fig. 9.2 Paul Kawachi, The position of social presence in the educative process (2018), CC BY 4.0

stops short of fully covering the Learner Presence. Learner Presence then envelops everything in the learning process. There are then two distinct forms — Social Presence and Cognitive Presence — exercised by the student, and these two have different functions. Social Presence conveys the party face or human side of the student to others; reducing barriers of physical isolation, communicating shared frustrations with getting the technology to work, working to reduce state anxieties (and in some cases reducing trait anxieties too), helping to bring about initial learning achievements, and develop integrative motivation to learn. Holding hands with group members here can ease the transition into Stage 2 collaborative learning where students must question each other and themselves, which can be stressful. The following Stage 3 collaborative learning is more difficult in that individual ideas are suspended, subjectivity is suspended, and objective disjunctive reasoning is needed — so that Social Presence has no educative role. Any personal distractions or flashbacks to the early social chat is not germane to the task at hand and will be diverted to social support groups off-campus. Indeed, Social Presence can lead to lower academic grades (Cunningham, Corprew and Becker, 2009): 'negative friends' have been defined as those that distract a student away from the collaborative strategies needed for learning, and hold back a student from academic future achievements. Cognitive Presence also begins in Stage 1 to let others know where you are coming from cognitively, your reasons for taking the course, your relevant prior knowledge that you are bringing to the learning process, knowledge you want to pool with others to build some form of shared basis, and your preferred ways of learning. This Cognitive Presence continues throughout the course as each student continues to participate in sharing and co-building knowledge. Some interactional skills are needed in the collaborative learning process as outlined in collaborative scaffolds, and Transactional Presence then becomes important from early on in Stage 2 collaborative learning. Transactional Presence skills may be synonymous with the critical thinking skills especially in Stage 3 of disjunctive reasoning and problem solving, and these skills must be demonstrated for public assessment of learning in cooperative Stage 4 where one also learns oneself through experiential learning. So Transactional Presence begins in Stage 2 and continues through Stages 3 and 4 in this figure. Stages 3 and 4 need guided conversation with a senior student or with a teacher — preferably with many expert teachers, and these stages are characterised by having educative Dialogue (where the earlier Stages 1 and 2 did not).

These six forms are summarised in Table 9.3 below — see Kawachi (2013) for details. Here the important point is that social media serves to facilitate Social Presence within the initial Stage 1 without any Structure imposed by the administration and without any educative dialogue from the teacher or from teaching materials, and carries the student into the Stage 2 academic forum where Structure begins. At this point, social media and Social Presence have no further role to play in achieving learning — except as non-academic support and possibly counselling. In any case the functions of social media are at this time best moved into an online chat-room, to leave the academic forum uncluttered and clear for academic collaborative interactions.

Fig. 9.3 Paul Kawachi, The essential kinds of presence in Online Education (2018), CC BY 4.0

### Results

There are no results here in terms of empirical findings for when forms of social media are avoided after the initial stage of constructing a social identity, to show that improved academic learning is achieved. However, the Transactional Distance Model has been extensively validated (Kawachi, 2005) in both online and face-to-face learning, and social presence has also been validated and even measured (Sood and Nevejan, 2012).

The findings of this discussion suggest that the tutor and students involved should limit the role of Social Presence to the initial Stage 1 only in the process of learning. From Stage 2 onwards the collaborative learning forum should be kept uncluttered by social postings which could better be moved away to an online café or other more suitable space online. Social Presence can be measured, and its variations can be followed. Social Presence should be defined as involving the actors rather than the acting, i.e. the 'who' dimension consists of the teacher presence (not teaching presence), learner presence (not learning presence), and other-students presence. Some cognitive presence will then occur in the educative process to move the student from the initial Stage 1 through into the collaborative learning forum and other Stages 2–4 to achieve learning.

The results here are at best a hypothesis for why Facebook and other social media have been associated in some studies with improved engagement and in other studies with weaker learning. While learning requires engagement, it does not follow that simply engaging will achieve learning — there needs to be effective cognitive reorganisation to bring about demonstrable learning. Given that Social Presence Theory can explain the conflicting outcomes using social media, further controlled studies are warranted. What is built is not so much a selfidentity but a peer-negotiated acceptance. Any small misstep can be retracted and rebuilt to construct an online persona that paves the way forward for future interactions to foster and enable learning.

### Discussion

The general usage of social media by colleges may be related to the increase of older adults enrolling, especially in open distance education. Older adults are well known to exhibit extrinsic social motivation to study (Kawachi, 2003), in other words they are motivated by the desire for socialisation, rather than academic interest.

Teachers and administrators use Facebook and other social media to communicate administrative information to students, such as forthcoming meetings or examinations. Students with mobile technologies can be contacted at any time or place. However, most students already know details of upcoming examinations and these media offer a benefit only when there is an emergency (such as unexpected change in examination venue) and there is a need to reach a large number of students cheaply. Outsider perceptions of social media for augmentative and alternative communication can be high, but in reality they mainly offer cost efficiency; administrators still need to get a response from each student and log this. The efficiency of other technologies such as the iPad for enhancing communication is similarly over-rated by non-users (Allen, Jeans, Ball and Guarino, 2015). Achieving added benefit from using social media technologies requires their use to be well integrated into the learning system.

### Suggestions

Social media can ease the student transition into college life. New students can generally be expected to demonstrate academic performance related anxiety. There is therefore a role for social media to support having fun, especially for younger students who may feel isolated and without integrative motivation. The role for fun here is to reduce performative anxiety, which in turn leads to the development of a community of learning. Reduced performative anxiety allows for some achievement in learning. But in order for the student to move on to develop the instrumental motivations for deeper quality of learning as an independent learner or as a collaborative group learner, this social integrative motivation with social media needs to side-lined or otherwise dispelled. Sometimes a teacher could manage this by giving measured personalised advice to the student — even going so far as to give negative comments perhaps by overly correcting slight misunderstandings to prevent the fossilisation of the learning process, and having the student stuck in social media and Facebook.

Colleges — particularly open universities — report stubborn high drop-out rates that recently are tending to increase. The increases over the past five-to-ten years in drop-out may be due to the increase in the numbers of marginal students not so well prepared for college studying. There are data for example from the Open University of Malaysia that tutor interventions can reduce this early drop-out rate. Such data suggests social media can help in the transition process to reduce the early

drop-out rate among first-year students, but does not have any significant effect on the non-completion rate. The suggested role of social media is likely related to the socialisation process and the development of Social Presence. Further research is warranted into the correlation between the amount and type of social media usage and student drop-out rates.

### References

# 10. Bursting Out of the Bubble: Social Media, Openness and Higher Education

*#Beginner #Medium*

*Jennie Blake, Chris Millson and Sam Aston*

### Introduction

This chapter will focus on the use of Medium.com to anchor a course's commitment to openness in HE. Its presence online has shaped student engagement with the content and the assessments, driving their work beyond the topics discussed on the day and inspiring them to create lasting content for the wider community. Finally, bursting out of the bubble of the academic community and VLEs has allowed everyone linked to the course to connect with other practitioners and discuss and disseminate the effects of these efforts.

### The Context

Open Knowledge in Higher Education (OKHE) is an open module exploring openness in HE, offered through the online writing platform, Medium.com (Medium, 2018). The initial materials were developed by The University of Manchester Library to support an optional module in the University's Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PG Cert HE), a taught programme for staff, comprising a number of optional modules.

Because of the Library's preference for openness, and the obvious connection with the subject matter of this module, we have taken an approach which is open in a number of ways. It is important that we are honest about how we got here. What we describe in this chapter — a course both exploring and exhibiting many aspects of openness (although of course with much room for improvement) — is not something we can honestly say we could describe in detail from the start. Instead, it is and will continue to be the result of a developmental journey. Our reflections on openness as course developers, many of whom have been prompted by being part of the course ourselves, learning from experts and participants alike — and our building some of this into each iteration of the course. So, if we did not have a detailed plan to take us from conception to the current state of the course, how did we get here? Openness can mean a lot in education (Prunie and Scheller, 2017), but by committing to being as open as we can at the time, to reflecting on this, and improving the course, has led us to where we are.

### Where Did We Start, Then?

Initially, we had a couple of aims for the assessment. Firstly, we wanted the process of completing the assessment to contribute to participants' learning, in other words an emphasis on 'assessment for learning' (Brown, 2005) rather than 'assessment of learning'. The course deals with topics such as open practice (and communicating online as one way this can take place) and ownership and licensing (and deciding how to share your work). We wanted participants to have an opportunity to explore and experience these topics for themselves, as they worked on their assessment.

Our first idea was that assessment would provide an opportunity for participants to contribute to a wiki. The wiki would contain discussions of and reflections about openness in higher education; participants would write and/or edit pages in it, thus expanding the resource. As part of our commitment to openness, it would ideally be public and open to all. Ideally it would also be open to contributions by all, i.e. 'our' participants' contributions could be identified for 'assessment' purposes, but that we would also be contributing a resource to the wider sector.

We considered a number of ideas around this — for example, how easy would it be to amalgamate one person's contributions, and 'mark' them? Was this against an open, collaborative ethos anyway ('standing on the shoulders of giants' etc)? Would we ask them to write a blog post or reflective piece exploring what they had achieved through the course, referencing their contributions?

The above ideas seemed to have mileage but didn't quite fit. For example, where would the 'core' course materials be hosted? This might include things like session times/dates, the mark scheme for assessment, and so on. We were following an idea that participants were contributing to the course materials, and trying to avoid the classic separation of assessment and other materials (for example, a 'closed-off' wiki or blog within a VLE course — alongside non-wiki materials). We were also looking for a platform where anyone could contribute. However, putting information such as session dates and times in a public wiki felt problematic in a couple of ways. Firstly, anyone could edit them, and that felt wrong for such fixed, official information with the University's name on it. Fine, a definition of openness will ideally be open to anyone to comment on and edit. But details of when and where sessions take place *should* be fixed. To change it would be unfair to participants.

Separating this information out, e.g. having 'core course materials' locked up in Blackboard, plus 'student contributions' in a public wiki, made the wiki feel synthetic. We wanted all of us to be contributing to the same materials, the course materials, and for this to be of genuine value.

It is clear that our wiki idea exhibited some forms of openness, but wasn't quite what we were looking for. At this point we explored other options, and considered the idea of using a more social platform. Some advantages of this are that authors are more prominent. For example, viewing a Twitter thread on 'Open education', we can read a discussion, and very easily see who contributed which parts to it, without having to look deeper. In comparison, a wiki page may present a more coherent narrative, but superficially, the authors are not acknowledged. The primary concern of a wiki is the content. Behind the scenes we can see an edit history, with associated usernames, but this is more concerned with process and accountability. We wanted something which would: allow participants to write 'as themselves' rather than being a near-invisible contributor; at the same time, to contribute to something bigger, and to be part of a conversation. Twitter or a traditional blogging platform (such as WordPress) might achieve the former. However, bringing the conversation together is difficult in these examples. Perhaps a hashtag could be proposed on Twitter which would bring conversations together. But this could be subject to 'noise' from anyone contributing to it, and Twitter is less successful at surfacing anything but the latest content. It might not feel like a 'home' for the course, more a snapshot of discussion on it. Giving or allowing participants to create a 'traditional blog' is not a new idea in education. Some advantages are that they can write more at length than a network such as Twitter, they create their own space and can consider it as part of their online identity. However, it may also lead to 'single-serving blogs', i.e. those set up for the course, only to go stale afterwards; it is also hard to bring these blogs together — effectively each writer runs their own publication — and we would have the task of unifying all of these publications, along with one or more publications of our own to contains core course information. It felt like we would be running another Library.

### Why Medium is Different

In exploring blogging and social networks, we were becoming familiar with one newer platform which seemed capable of achieving our objectives: Medium. The platform was set up as a 'writing platform' or 'ideas platform'. While this may sound like a pretentious refusal to 'just call it a blog', we realised that there is in fact a difference to the way Medium operates. Whereas a system like WordPress gives each writer a publication (and indeed, there is no way to publish a post on WordPress without first setting up a publication, effectively a website), and all that one can do with their account otherwise is comment on others' publications, Medium does not. Creating an account on Medium allows you instantly to publish content. This content does not live on your website/publication/blog, but simply on Medium. Thus, it is a blogging platform but its posts are hosted centrally. This helps us in a number of ways. Firstly, there *is no single-serving blog.* Just as Twitter does not look stale after one person stops tweeting, Medium continues to highlight the community's content after one person stops publishing. Secondly, there is no setting-up of a blog, only a personal profile. On WordPress, your profile allows you to comment. On Medium, it allows you to post. In fact, Medium makes very little distinction between comments and posts — much like Twitter, comments (or responses) *are* posts; posts which reference other posts.

Our open approach has a number of implications. While the Library initially developed and maintains the module, from its first year onwards, most of the materials have been contributed by participants. This learner-contributed approach has continued, and we are continuing to develop it. For example, in the second year of running, we explicitly referenced participant contributions in core course materials. In the third year, we set participant contributions as reading, and featured past participants in every classroom session.

### Pedagogy of Open Assessment

From its conception, it was clear that the module had the potential to live and breathe openly through every part its soul. As developers it was vital that within the constraints of organisational policy there was a transparent commitment towards openness in the pedagogical approach, into assessment, throughout the learning resources and in how the unit approached the outcomes of the overall certificate. It was also necessary to consider the cohort of students and their professional experiences connected to the module outcomes. It was with these elements in mind that social media became the vehicle which would allow the module to burst out of its bubble.

Social media has been used to support pedagogical innovation by educators in higher education for a number of years, as it has the flexibility and accessibility to support learning in the HE sector (OU, 2016). In particular, social media has thrived in the arena of openness through its ability to support networks and communities of practice, driving collaboration while allowing for individuals to maintain their individuality and a voice in the conversation. Social media is also recognised as a space where an ongoing dialogue can take place. Therefore, it made sense to align a method by which we could connect with and facilitate the connection to openness as part of the modules assessment. Going beyond the tool the beauty of social media is that it places the voices of the individuals involved at its heart.

Individually, every participant's voice is heard as they submit written assessments to the OKHE publication. Through their online engagements, participants are engaged in open networked participatory scholarship (Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012). Contributing posts that connect their personal experiences with openness in HE to the publication is an integral feature of the open scholarship that OKHE extols. OKHE publication permits individuals to authentically explore the concept of openness in the context of their professional role, in keeping with the purpose and the philosophy of social media. There is the further added strength of placing the ownership of content into the participants own hands, prompting participants to consider their online identity and creating a backwash of development for each individual's digital literacy skills.

Participants have explored a range of current topics, including how Sci-hub provides access to non-open access research; how openness is considered in relation to academic integrity and academic expectation; as well as MOOCs and their role in openness. It is through the transparency of using a social media platform that participants can connect with current conversations.

In the same way that the publication opens up the voices of the individuals, the publication operates as the mouthpiece for the community that the module draws together. As a community the posts that the publication exposes are the thoughts of professionals at University of Manchester (UoM), those at the 'coal face' that are not only engaging in open education but contributing to and opening up the wider conversation. The publication that is being created by the community is what is used to support the growing community of cohorts: it is a community-built open educational resource.

Framing the participants as co-learners and co-creators on the module was a deliberate objective which social media was able to facilitate. The UoM Library has a reputation for open educational practice and the creation of open educational resources through its My Learning Essentials (UoM, 2018) skills programme and our approach to this module proved no different. As co-creators, the participants' thoughts are collated in one single space that is open for engagement with the wider community.

With the publication acting as a transparent virtual learning environment, Medium has facilitated the opinions and thoughts of the cohort being shared widely, as well as being available to each other and to the learning community at UoM. Dalsgaard and Thestrup (2015) refer to the three dimensions of openness: transparency between students and teachers, communication between educational institutions and partners, and joint engagement with the world. The Medium publication is representative of the first two dimensions, with the aspiration of moving towards working partnerships with others in the wider online community.

The design of the course acknowledging the professional experience of the cohort the developers have used Medium to level the classroom. The cohort are made up of a wide variety of professions from across the University staff: lecturers, researchers, library staff, e-learning technologists and professional support services. It was therefore vital that we provide the right support in the right format. As mentioned previously, there have been a range of topics covered through the cohorts: the online publication of the assessment tasks is a record of the conversations taking place about openness at the UoM. Writing and publishing in this way has enabled the thoughts and reflections of the participants to be a part of the conversations that are taking place in the sector.

### Beyond The Ivory Tower

Moving students 'beyond the mark' has been one of the perennial struggles of education. Much work has been done to try and drive students to think of their work as part of a learning journey, as part of a community, and as part of a process of collective thought. Even more rare (though it is becoming more common), is work that deliberately places the assessment into the public sphere, and participates in raucous conversations, from the off. The assessments within the OKHE module, as described earlier in the chapter, take a deliberately, and potentially provocative pedagogical approach and ask that participants join in with the conversations already occurring, and, in the second assessment, make deliberate connections to what they hear in that space.

Higher education, and academia in general, is often dismissed as an ivory tower, a silo, or disparaged as comprising of disconnected and self-indulgent thought exercises. To these critics, it is the very opposite of 'open'; a place where the only sound is the echo of its own voice. The pernicious cycle of a closed system is described by Thomas Pynchon, in his 'Slow Learner' collection, where he states:

What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on. (Pynchon, 1985)

It is as part of our effort to combat the closed circuit that we built social media into our module. After committing to open knowledge as a topic, we felt that putting our discussions, resources and assessments behind the walled-garden of a virtual learning environment would directly contradict the aims of the course. Instead, we pushed everything, and everyone, out into the open. The results: a group of participants that must think about their place in the conversation; pieces that deliberately add to current and 'live' conversations, and, hopefully a more powerful voice when the work 'joins up' in the public sphere, are all down to the use of this open platform. We are, quite deliberately, putting our module where our content lives, in the space where academia and open networks overlap, which, more than ever, has a social component.

### Reflecting on the Medium

Using the Medium publication, we have been able to relocate the conversation from what might be a self-contained silo to a wider audience. This has a knock-on effect immediately as the participants must think of their audience beyond the typical groups of others on the course or course convenors to, potentially, include those with an interest in open, an interest in Manchester, or just a liking for Google's 'I'm Lucky' button. This hasn't been without hiccoughs, and though we support the ability for participants to post anonymously to the blog, for some the act of putting their thoughts online (and often reflective and personal thoughts at that) is a truly disconcerting one, prompting them to stop, reflect and possibly self-censor in a way they wouldn't feel necessary in a closed conversation. One participant took this reflection even further, looking at what we, as staff in HE, might need to do when we enter the 'open' world:

What the OKHE course has enabled me to understand is that openness inevitably brings with it challenges, and by being open you will facilitate views that you dislike or challenge your own views. In order to preserve an open environment I think that as staff members [we] have to stop thinking of ourselves as the owners of these online communities and try to engage with them as participants instead.

This type of reflection, one that might not have occurred without the open assessments, materials and resources, highlights a major change when we join in on social media. Often, even with a blue tickmark in evidence, the hierarchies that we depend on for respect and acknowledgement are absent, forcing us to join in on a level playing field and make our voices heard from the crown instead of at the podium. Indeed, what might seem appropriate (and what might be rewarded) in a closed-system is very different from what resonates and is rewarded online, and for those comfortable with the status-quo, moving to 'open' can be revealing in its discomfort.

Beyond assessment, the OKHE Medium site is meant to drive our participants to think about where their reflection sits in the cohort, in the community and in the wider conversation. Our placement of our assessment, and the entirety of the course, on an open social media platform, allows us to encourage, though not guarantee, that we hear the 'x-rays and ultraviolets' that are happening just outside the bubble we are existing in. Because the posts of previous cohorts are kept online, along with all of the talks and supporting materials, the students are participating in a course that builds links in time as well as between topics. We can see how our thinking has changed, and detail our reactions to those changes, in a way that is predominantly absent in a traditional course.

This change also allows the course to impact the open community beyond the work of one or two stand-outs. Because we are operating as a collective, we are not dependent on the presence of a well-known (or well followed), individual. Instead, the course itself, through the work of the participants, convenors and those giving their talks, makes an impact because of what everyone is doing together. This has meant, in practical terms, that those we reach out to give the talks on the module have often already heard of the course, that the work we do for assessment gets looked at, and imitated in other areas of the University of Manchester, and that we get invited to write book chapters like this one!

### References

# 11. Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Understanding Social Media Beyond the Screen

*#Beginner #Facebook #WhatsApp #CambridgeAnalytica*

*Zoetanya Sujon*

### Introduction

One of the challenges many HE professionals face in classrooms oriented around learning about social media, is that of teaching apparently digitally-savvy students who feel their intense familiarity with social media is the same as critical understanding. While some may of course be critically minded, or even possess a sophisticated understanding of algorithms, privacy, and the complex structures of social media; many do not. As such, guiding learners to move beyond their experience of the newsfeed, stream, or front page can be tremendously challenging as well as tremendously rewarding.

This chapter examines one approach for dealing with this sometimes difficult teaching context, providing a broad overview of the growing importance of critical perspectives on social media. Beginning with an outline of the rich variety of student experiences, this chapter contextualises some of the learning challenges I have encountered in my own classrooms while teaching social media; challenges which require an open classroom and a critical view of the idea of 'digital natives'. This chapter also presents Facebook, particularly its interactions with Cambridge Analytica, as an ideal case for tackling the complexities of social media and pushing users beyond the social experience. The aim of this section is to examine the importance of personal data as the core business model of Facebook, and most mainstream or corporate social media.

Finally, this chapter includes three key exercises that can be used in classrooms to help learners to understand how Facebook works, and some of what the Cambridge Analytica case reveals about social media. In sum, the purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the best ways to bring critical thinking into the experience of social media, providing a mix of theory and practical tasks which can help learners understand concepts of personal data collection and 'surveillance capitalism' in relation to their own social media use. The Cambridge Analytica case is particularly important and effective for engaging learners' critical understanding of social media and moving their perspective beyond the screen.

### Students, Screens, and Social Media

Many HE professionals regard young adults as 'digital natives' who come into the classroom with an innate understanding of new technologies and digital skills (e.g. Prensky 2001, 2012). Many also draw on ideas from the 'Visitor and Resident' model in order to understand the skills young people develop as a consequence of their engagement with social and digital tools (e.g. White and Le Cornu 2011). Based on what I see in my classrooms, many young people do bring an intense familiarity with social media based on everyday use, yet this is familiarity is uneven across each cohort of students. Many among them have limited experience and understanding, perhaps as a result of a personal or parental rejection of social media in their lives.

This uneven familiarity and understanding is important for two reasons. First, as educators, it is vital to challenge assumptions about young people as 'digital natives', and instead establish a classroom environment that is as open for those with relatively little knowledge as it is for those who are very experienced. In this sense, understanding use based on levels of experience and critical understanding, rather than on levels of expertise, is an important starting point. Growing evidence suggests that the concept of 'digital natives' overstates many young peoples' digital knowledge and skills, so an open classroom can make all the difference for those coming from the more unfamiliar end of the spectrum (e.g. Das and Beckett 2009; Helsper and Eynon 2009). Second, as I will argue throughout this chapter, Facebook, like other social media platforms, does considerable work to keep its users on the newsfeed rather than on the almost infinite options beyond the 'front page' of user experience. In many ways, most peoples' experiences of social media resemble those of automobile drivers — we may know how to drive the car, but that does not mean we know what is under the hood, how roads are built, how traffic is regulated, or anything about the trade fluctuations and power dynamics of the petrol and oil industries.

A broader understanding of the social media landscape does not necessarily require advanced technical skills, and can introduce users to a more critical understanding of what they are interacting with. Given the scope, breadth, and power of social media, this critical approach is urgent, and is the first step towards breaking down common misunderstandings that social media does not constitute anything more than a newsfeed. Facebook's role in reinforcing this common misunderstanding is clearly apparent in the Cambridge Analytica case.

### Cambridge Analytica: 'It's a Feature Not a Bug'

In early 2018, revelations were widely published revealing the misuse of 87 million people's personal data, gathered in 2014 by Cambridge academic Aleksander Kogan, through a Facebook app personality quiz called 'thisisyourdigitalife' (Madrigal 2018; Tufekci 2017, 2018). Using the Facebook platform, the app not only collected personal data from approximately 300,000 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers paid \$1 or \$2 to complete the quiz, but also personal information from each of those worker's friend accounts. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains that this data was shared with Cambridge Analytica — a political campaigning and marketing company — in breach of Facebook's terms and conditions. Indeed, Facebook did suspend Kogan's app and demanded certification from Cambridge Analytica (CA) that they had deleted all data that had been collected. While CA apparently did provide certification, the data has since been linked with both Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, and with various Brexit leave campaigns (Chen 2018; Tufecki 2018; Zuckerberg as cited in Thompson 2018; Osborne and Parkinson 2018; Greenfield 2018).

The case involves use of Facebook's open social graph, a service which has allowed app developers and third parties to access certain kinds of user information via the Facebook platform. Drawing from this case, there are two significant implications which are essential for broadly understanding social media, and Facebook in particular. The first is that this case is not a scandal or data breach — instead, it reveals the inner workings and logic of social media platforms. Second, these platforms work very hard to keep users on the 'news feed', obscuring the big business of personal data collection behind the 'social' purpose of these platforms, as explained below.

Leading thinkers on digital media and politics argue that the 'data misuse' of the CA case 'is a feature, not a bug', not just of Facebook, but also social media platforms more broadly (Zuckerman 2018; Tufecki 2017, 2018). Referring to Facebook as a 'surveillance machine' or what Zuboff terms 'surveillance capitalism' (2015), Tufekci (2018) argues:

Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook's true customers, whom it works hard to please.

The widespread 'misuse' of personal data can also be observed in Facebook's 'shadow profiles' — profiles made up of data gathered from Facebook users' contact lists and web browsing behaviours — which have been long understood to be the basis for the 'people you may know' algorithm. In addition, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum has resigned from WhatsApp and the Facebook board of directors over privacy concerns (White 2018; Solon 2018). Indeed, in the risk assessment section of its 2018 first quarter report, Facebook has warned shareholders that: 'We anticipate that we will discover and announce additional incidents of misuse of user data or other undesirable activity by third parties' (Levy 2018; Facebook Inc. 2018). Many others have pointed to Facebook's problematic data collection procedures, ranging, for example, from the 2014 mood manipulation study (Meyer 2014; Kramer et al. 2014) to targeting 'Jew haters' in advertising and political campaigns, highlighting the profitability of big data (Tufekci 2017; cf. Zuboff 2015; Van Dijck 2013; Morozov 2012).

What is particularly important about this is that Facebook, like other social platforms, presents itself as primarily a social network, giving users 'the power to share and to make the world more open and connected' (Facebook's mission statement, 2004–2018). As such, Facebook claims its primary aim is to connect people and more recently 'to bring the world closer together' (Facebook mission statement 2018), rather than the monetisation of social interactions and personal data collection. For all of these reasons, today's students must work to critically understand social media as more than just social networks and tools for interpersonal communication, regardless of whether they use social media or not.

### Personal Data Exercises

Although the CA events clearly illustrate the practice of monetising personal data collection on Facebook, many students may struggle to understand how this applies to them and their data. Drawing from Lave and Wenger's (1990) notion of situated and participatory learning, the following exercises have been developed to illustrate the scope, scale, and applicability not only of personal data collection, but also of the use of the data and the lack of user rights on social media.

### Exercise 1: Review Facebook's 'Statement of Rights and Responsibilities' or 'Terms of Service'

Many of today's social media users, including students at many levels, admit to having never read the terms and conditions or end user licence agreements of the sites, platforms, apps, or devices they use. As such, one of the first helpful exercises for introducing users to social media beyond the newsfeed is to ask them to review the terms and conditions which most people click through without reading or considering what their rights may be. Although the CA case has prompted the development of new Facebook terms (introduced as of 19 April 2018), there are still a number of consistencies with prior versions. These can be found by clicking on 'terms' often found on the bottom right of the Facebook.com home page (you can access Facebook's terms if you are logged in and if you are not, see Fig. 11.1 below).

Fig. 11.1 Zoetanya Sujon, Screenshot highlighting Facebook's 'Terms' (2018), CC BY 4.0

The link pathways are different depending on whether you are logged in or not. First, it is important to review the terms which outline your rights and responsibilities as a Facebook user. Many find the terms and conditions off-putting, particularly as the small print and formal language can be difficult to read and understand — these are points which have been addressed in the April 2019 updates. However, despite the challenges of reading the terms, many report that this exercise is eye-opening and worth the effort. While there are many things to focus on during this kind of session, I ask students to review the statement of rights and responsibilities, their privacy settings, and the data policy — identifying what stands out to them and what they think is important — often leading to lively discussion.

One part of the terms and conditions which I draw attention to falls about halfway through Facebook's 'Terms of Service', under section '3.3 The permissions you give us'. In this section, Facebook outlines what kind of permissions they need in order to let you use Facebook (2018, my emphasis):

Permission to use content that you create and share: You own the content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Products you use, and nothing in these Terms takes away the rights that you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want. To provide our services though, we need you to give us some legal permissions to use that content. Specifically, when you share, post or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (e.g. photos or videos) on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).

The highlighted part of the above terms was almost identical in prior version of Facebook's terms and conditions other than moving the placement of this statement from the first section of the 'Statement of Rights and Responsibilities' ('2. Sharing your content and information', 31 January 2018, https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms) to considerably lower on the page, as well as some minor re-ordering of the words within the statement.

Although users and non-users identify community standards, safety, data policy, and privacy settings as important, 'the permissions you give us' are demonstrative of some of the double logic at work, as well as Facebook's total control of personal content and data (i.e. 'You own the content you create and share….[and] you give us non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content'). Participants are also strongly advised to review and reflect on Facebook's 'Data Policy'.

#### Exercise 2: Activity log

The purpose of this short exercise is to encourage learners with a Facebook account to explore Facebook's record of *all* of their activity on Facebook from the present moment back to the day they signed up for an account. The activity log can be found by clicking on the ▼ icon in the top right-hand corner of any Facebook page (see Fig. 11.2 below).

Once users have found their activity log, they will see a long list of every like, comment, share, video watched, and other kinds of

Fig. 11.2 Zoetanya Sujon, Locating the activity log on your Facebook account (2018), CC BY 4.0

behaviour. While it is valuable to ask participants to review their activity log at their leisure, it is worth pointing out that they have a number of filters located on the left of their activity log, which organizes Facebook activity according to particular kinds of behaviour; These categories, found on the left hand side of your activity log, include:

Each filter provides a complete list of Facebook activity related to that category. Clicking on 'articles you've read' or 'videos you've watched', for example, reveals a complete list of articles or videos you've clicked on or even hovered over without clicking. While it is possible to clear some of these activity filters (e.g. 'search history' or 'videos you've watched') with a single click, it is more difficult to edit or delete other activities on your timeline (see Fig. 11.3).

On the right side of each event recorded in your activity log, you will see an indication of who your action is visible to, including 'public', 'friends', 'only me', or 'custom' (see icons circled in Fig. 11.3, and a full list of visibility options in box 1).

Fig. 11.3 Zoetanya Sujon, One event from a Facebook activity log, highlighting visibility settings (2018), CC BY 4.0

Globe-americas **Public**: When you share something with Public that means anyone including people off of Facebook can see it.

user-friends **Friends (+ friends of anyone tagged)**: This option lets you post stuff to your friends on Facebook. If anyone else is tagged in a post, then the audience expands to also include the tagged person and their friends. If you don't want your photo or post to be visible to the friends of the people you tag, you can adjust this setting. Click the audience selector next to the story, select Cog **Custom**, and uncheck the **Friends of those tagged** box.

Lock **Only Me**: This option allows you to post stuff to your timeline that is visible only to you. Posts with the audience of Only Me will appear in your News Feed but not your friends' feeds. If you tag someone in an Only Me post, they will be able to see the post.

Cog **Custom**: When you choose Custom, you can selectively share something with specific people, or hide it from specific people. You can also share with specific friend lists if you've set them up, such as Family or Best Friends, or hide posts from your Coworkers list. Custom also provides the option to share with groups or networks you belong to.

Fig. 11.4 Zoetanya Sujon, Screenshot of Facebook's options for who can see your activity on Facebook, from 'What audiences can I choose from when I share?' (2018), CC BY 4.0

Based on the visibility settings, it is possible to identify who can see what activity, although these settings are determined by the original poster, which means they cannot be changed for any content you have not created. The event shown on the activity log in Figure 11.3 is public, meaning it is visible to everyone on the Internet, as indicated by the globe icon. The other editing option shown by the pen icon (shown in the red circle in the figure), allows you to unlike, unfollow, delete or hide a comment or shared post.

### Conclusion

In conclusion, this short essay has provided an overview of key challenges many HE professionals face in today's classrooms, including widespread assumptions regarding young people's levels of experience and critical understanding with social technologies. In order to illustrate the importance of a critical understanding, this chapter focuses on recent events between the misuse of 87 million Facebook users personal data by Cambridge Analytica, briefly explaining what happened and what the implications are. Following this, several key exercises intended to demonstrate the wealth of personal data collected and held by Facebook are introduced. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a framework for teachers and HE professionals to use in classrooms, in part or as a whole, to contribute to learners' data literacy, not only of Facebook, but of social media more broadly. #DeleteFacebook may be a temporary solution to personal data infringements, but, as many leading thinkers have argued, Cambridge Analytica is not a breach or scandal, rather, it capitalizes on social media's organizing logic — the monetisation of personal data.

### Other Suggested Exercises:

#### 1. Facebook company directory

In order to get a sense of the size and scope of Facebook, review Facebook's key pages and products through its company directory. Note any pages that stand out or are interesting to you. What do these product teams and pages tell you about Facebook as a company? https:// newsroom.fb.com/pages-directory/

### 2. Ad preferences

Based on the information you give Facebook (e.g. name, age, marital status, parental status, where you work, go to school etc.), your browsing behaviour on Facebook (e.g. likes, groups, friends, messages, clicks, etc.), and your online behaviour on other apps and sites shared through the Facebook platform and cookies, Facebook builds an overview of your interests and habits. These interests and habits are organized in categories which advertisers buy access too. These categories are called 'ad preferences'. You can view your own 'ad preferences' here: https:// www.facebook.com/ads/preferences (you must be logged in to see this feature and for the link to work).

#### 3. Platform and apps

With the 2007 launch of Facebook log-in (now Facebook Connect) — a service allowing users to log-in to external web-sites using their Facebook username and password — Facebook transformed from a single web site to a MobileFirst platform. Anne Helmond (2015), leading thinker in platform studies, defines the move as 'the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data "platform ready"'. The Facebook platform enabled personal user data to be collected and shared across services and accounts, just as it was between Aleksander Kogan's personality quiz app, 87 million users, and Cambridge Analytica. Check your own app and platform settings under 'Apps, websites, and games': https://www.facebook. com/settings?tab=applications (you must be logged in to see this feature and for link to work).

### References

PART FOUR LEADERSHIP

# 12. Leadership and Social Media

*#Beginner #Leadership #Twitter*

*Julie Hall*

### Introduction

Communication is highlighted as an essential leadership skill, yet relatively few senior leaders in UK universities seem to make use of an active social media account. While universities have embraced social media and especially Twitter for marketing purposes, university leaders seem to be more nervous about it than leaders in other spheres. This seems at odds with university missions linked to public engagement, knowledge exchange, and thought leadership. Yet perhaps this reluctance reflects a sense that a social media presence can be tricky. As Bonnie Stewart (2017) says '"the digital" is increasingly a delivery system for surveillance and spectacle and amplified uncertainty.' This chapter outlines some of reasons why university leaders might use social media, despite the challenges, and explores some challenges, especially for women.

# Use It to Understand the Time Travellers and Body Shifters with Whom We Are Teaching and Working

Many of our colleagues and our students are with us in the 3D world of offices, seminars, lectures, tables and chairs, while also having a life in the 4D of digital space. They are the gamers and the social media residents. Research (Davies S. et al., 2017) indicates that many students are finding it difficult to engage with higher education in the traditional ways which are often taken for granted. 4D identities contrast with their university lives and intersect with race, class, gender and religion. This is potentially a large group in our universities, and I believe we must pay them attention and model some of the practices we are encouraging academics to adopt.

Laurence Scott, in his book *The Four Dimensional Human* (2015), explains how early experiences of the Internet involved the notion of travelling to other worlds through aptly named search engines called Explorer and Safari. This 4th dimension doesn't sit beside real life; it has become a full part of the lives of many students and colleagues. It is no longer a space travelled to via phone lines. People are in our lecture halls, offices and classrooms and simultaneously, often secretly, via powerful mobile phones on their laps, elsewhere in their 4D spaces. The world has taken on extra dimensions and all aspects of our lives are up for digitisation — a building we notice, a meal we eat, a view from a window, a thought, our alternative personas, new adventures, new perspectives. Many of our students exist in multiple places at once, honing skills of communication, leadership, strategy, and dexterity, but then we trap them in lecture halls and tell them things that they could find out themselves. University leaders must recognise the challenges this brings and aid their universities in understanding the multidimensional worlds of many students and colleagues.

The digital world is also one of connectedness and gratification with feedback loops that keep a person hooked. This isn't about young students as in Prensky's (2001) 'digital natives', and those in leadership roles as older digital tourists. While students are often confident travellers we can't assume discernment; with unfettered access to everything, it is a challenge to make critical distinctions. Yet familiarity with feedback loops and the associated affirmations of progress or connections mean that work or study can easily feel isolating and alienated when feedback is less forthcoming or less personalised. This can have an effect on motivation and engagement that leaders must take notice of. It is clear that, for many of our students and colleagues, gaming and social media can provide a sense of community, a social experience of cooperation, motivation, problem-based learning and team work, often at an international level. The contrast with the hyper individualism of work in large institutions such as universities is stark. Ironically, it is the digital world that is providing opportunities for communities of learning, metacognition, self-regulation, and for many of the transferable skills universities and employers cite as critical.

Yet while what it means to be physically present has changed, the pressures of 'everywhereness' can produce a sense of absenteeism — despite occupying many places at once and being different people at once, perhaps none of them are fully inhabited. In universities this can take a worrying turn when students or our colleagues are here in the seminar room and there in the digital world at the same time — or more worryingly, they are actually there while only pretending to be here with us in the old confines of 3D. If what Laurence Scott (2015) calls 'intermittent elsewhereness' is their reality, is it not a violent — or at the very least an uncomfortable — act to trap them in 3D? Can we offer something more in the HE classroom, perhaps something that harnesses technology and which is co-produced, building on the motivations of online mastery — something which is worth physically coming to university for? For me, this is a question that university leaders must be engage with.

## Use It to Raise the Profile of the University Internally and Externally

Many leaders use Twitter as a simple way to broadcast information to their followers. A number of university leaders have Twitter accounts organised by their PR teams, resulting in tweets congratulating students, highlighting good news such as successful research bids, retweeting university messages, and welcoming people back after the holidays. Often associated with corporate photographs, such tweets are a PR vehicle rather than a personal position or comment. Following such accounts can be dull without a sense of the person behind them or an invitation to engage. Such accounts often ignore trending hashtags and fail to follow others back, relying on a one way production of news rather than the dialogue that social media offers.

Yet such accounts can also be helpful in indicating that someone in a senior position has noticed a conference or a student's achievements. Such posts can become even more powerful with the addition of a personal comment or video clip, communicating a sense of pride or admiration for work conducted. In this sense, the tweets are as much about recognising colleagues as promoting the university. With lack of recognition regularly cited as a reason for leaving an organisation, this can be a good use of social media.

However, for me, too much pre planned material can be a barrier to collaboration, public engagement, and co-creation. Corporate messages rarely invite participation. To make the most of social media, leaders need to embrace openness and the authentic — even the unpolished — traits that may not be normally espoused by university leaders. Getting the balance right can be a challenge, especially with followers connected in the past because of a shared research interest, which a new leadership role might allow little time for. While being wary of the kind of Twitter storms created by the current American president's regular tweets, I would like to see more university leaders going beyond the corporate and engaging with university policy changes and debates through social media. While requiring extreme care, this can be achieved by linking a post to a hashtag and thereby connecting it with something beyond the university, and also by carefully retweeting and replying to others who have tweeted on a similar issue.

### Use it to Connect — to Build Relationships and a Personal Profile

For university leaders, an effective social media presence can build networks of external and internal relationships. It can play a critical role in the public engagement or civic mission of the University. When used sensitively it can align a leader with particular campaigns. In 2016, President Dr Santa Ono at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver chose to share his own experience of attempted suicide with his 70,000 Twitter followers, garnering much praise for his honesty. This kind of use offers an insight into the ethical stance of a leader and may or may not accord with the stance of the University. Bonnie Stewart (2016) describes such disclosures as 'the political act of putting their face and voice behind an issue — important and strategic forms of awareness-raising.' Like Stewart, I believe this is good for higher education because in sharing our vulnerability we challenge stigma and align ourselves authentically to the things we care about. However, particularly as a woman, it can sometimes be a challenge to provide a glimpse into the causes that inspire, upset, and anger me, my authentic self, while maintaining a responsible leadership profile that represents the university. A leader has a responsibility for the strategic direction, mission, and values of the university; but may also have been appointed because of a commitment to a particular stance on university education or a research background in a particular area. Representing a particular stance in social media can be a way of making leadership values visible, and encouraging commitment and support across a university.

It is not difficult to point to leaders who do not understand their duty to communicate in a way that recognizes the gravity of their words and the positions they take on world events. This isn't an issue linked to the use of new technology, it is about inappropriate communication and, occasionally, the abuse of power. A leader needs to be trusted, and a social media presence, perhaps particularly for a woman who may be in a minority, must demonstrate awareness of power relations and the public nature of the role. Consequently, some kinds of public dialogue may have to be curtailed.

While authenticity is praised as a leadership trait, the inherent risks of engaging so publicly can create reluctance, uncertainty, and unease. Social media fractures the more traditional vertical communication in organizations and opens up channels for spontaneous dialogue across management levels. It can therefore cut across established power dynamics and traditional lines of communication. In contrast with traditional leadership communication, leaders are unable to control a message once it enters the social media system. Yet just because the platform is digital, we can't assume that we are creating a commons — a healthy democratic, decent social space. Twitter, for example, can also accentuate the worst examples of leadership: pronouncements rather than listening, manipulating the visible, garnering acknowledgements in particular spaces. Yet perhaps as a leader we can also model our best intentions — encouraging collaboration, cooperation, creating challenge and engagement, and valuing others.

We must understand how a message might go viral and even how it might be adapted and re-created. This has been described as 'distribution competence' — the ability to influence the way messages move through complex organisations. It is arguably as important as the skill of creating compelling content. When the higher education context changes so rapidly and our students' experiences can be shared, debated, and criticised within a few seconds through media channels, social media literacy can be a critical skill for leadership.

Roland Deiser and Sylvain Newton (2013) argue that 'the dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with an organization's social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization'. The ultimate challenge as a university leader is to balance openness with responsibility: to embrace the opportunity of sharing stories, achievements, and opinions simultaneously with the organization, the public, family, friends, and stakeholders around the world — all while being responsible for the university's standards of integrity. This results in an internal dialogue about the professional and personal. As a female leader, I am keenly aware of the kinds of criticisms we can receive for being outspoken, not so that we temper our presence, but so that we consider any unintended consequences and are prepared, as many female politicians have had to be, for backlash or even attack. Women are particularly vulnerable to attacks from those who imagine we should have a carefully defined role. As Sarah Ahmed (2015) warns, 'When you slip out of what or who you are supposed to be, you slip into trouble'.

For me, social media and Twitter in particular, is a valuable filtered feed of information and news, when the role requires fast decisions and up-to-date news and opinion. Choosing who to follow on Twitter, for example, can result in a complex daily picture of pressing issues, campaigns, opinions, news and good practice which can be shared with others very quickly. In such a responsible role, the provenance of such information is important before retweeting or commenting. In taking a responsible approach we take a proactive role in raising the social media literacy of the organisation.

As a leader I am committed to encouraging academic colleagues to use Twitter and other social media to connect and share their work and ideas. Wider conversations and connections develop and new audiences for research and teaching are located or even created. Interdisciplinarity abounds across social media, and some this can lead to the kind of impact measures universities encourage — requests for collaborative research, invited keynotes, opportunities to bid for grants. What counts online, however, goes beyond research metrics and institutional status; it is the capacity to contribute to the conversation and this is incredibly liberating whether we are university leaders, students, or in the early stages of academic careers.

### References

# 13. Leadership and Social Media: Challenges and Opportunities

*#Intermediate #Jisc #Twitter #Identity*

*Donna M. Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps*

### Introduction

The sound of one person talking is not, obviously, a conversation. The same applies to organizational conversation, in which leaders talk with employees and not just to them. This interactivity makes the conversation open and fluid rather than closed and directive. It entails shunning the simplicity of monologue and embracing the unpredictable vitality of dialogue. (Groysberg and Slind, 2012)

Since 2015, together with a team of colleagues from Jisc, we have been developing and delivering the Jisc Digital Leadership course. This course is designed to give institutional leaders the opportunity to explore how the digital world impacts on their personal practice and how they can make effective use of digital tools, places, and platforms in their organisations. Within one particular module of the course, we facilitate conversations with leaders to explore the implications of social media practices beyond concerns about platforms and literacies. We approach social media as a set of practices, and the Internet as a place, to make room for considering the opportunities presented by social media and other online places for leaders (Lanclos et al 2016). This chapter will start with a discussion of the motivations of leaders to come onto the course, and the major concerns they express during the run of the course. Then we discuss what authenticity and credibility mean to the leaders on the course, and explore the ways that personal identity has an impact on their approaches to their work, including digital aspects of their work. Finally, we discuss the methods we use to elicit the necessary conversations within this part of the course, focusing on behaviour mapping rather than trying to define and identify 'types' of individuals.

### Motivations to Engage

Before the delegates arrive to the Jisc Digital Leadership course, they submit their motivations for attending, as well as their own definitions of leadership. Over the six iterations of the course thus far, we have had approximately 200 delegates attend, and consistent themes emerge from the stated motivations. Some of the motivations are intrinsic, and some are extrinsic — we have delegates who sign themselves up for the course, because they think it will benefit them personally or their organization, and others who are told to attend by their supervisors because of organisational priorities.

Perhaps most obvious motivations are those of delegates that focus on operational aspects, those who wish to gain more understanding of the potential of the digital, and how and why it can be implemented. They also wish to have opportunities to challenge themselves and push their own practices. Having a chance to gain insights from their peers, and to build a network they can call upon in the course of their leadership challenges, is another primary set of motivations. Delegates are also intent on acquiring strategies for leading or affecting change. There is a significant desire to have chances not just to reflect on practice, but to acquire the confidence to challenge and change what they are doing, and bring those changes to a wider set of people in their organizations.

During the course, it is clear from the conversations that delegates are aware that there are things they should be doing in and around digital and social media, and also things that they do not wish to engage in, because they think it will distract from the work they need to accomplish. In addition, they talk about things they want to do with their personal online practices, in particular to connect with people who they would not otherwise encounter face to face. They wish to find enjoyment in their practices, and in the connections they can make.

These motivations and concerns that delegates bring with them on the course form part of the larger context for the specific conversations we want to elicit. While the Jisc Digital Leadership course is delivered over four days, the module where we have people map, reflect on, and strategise about their individual and organisational practices takes place over only one day. However, the drawing of those maps, and the reflections on them at the outset of the course, are key to understanding and developing the leaders' practice and strategies, and links are drawn from subsequent modules back to those maps (Phipps and Lanclos, 2017).

### Being and Leading Online

It is important at the beginning of our discussions of social media during the leadership course to be clear about what we mean by 'social'. Too often this is taken, especially in the UK, to mean 'unprofessional'. Key to our discussions around digital leadership is that when we talk about 'social', we are talking about it in the sense of 'connecting with people'. We are also clear that we are not approaching social media within one particular platform or digital place, but as a collective set of places and practices, which can accommodate a wide range of people and motivations.

In initial iterations of the course, we had delegates map themselves and their digital practices on the Visitors and Residents continuum (White and Le Cornu, 2011). The utility of this framing was several-fold: 1) it moved people away from negative and essentialising narratives around 'digital natives'; 2) it gave people a technique with which to describe their digital practices that allowed for a visual approach, rather than one bound by text; 3) it provided a framework that allowed for the discussion of digital places, rather than just tools, accounts, or platforms. In conceiving of the digital as a place, we gain the ability to talk about where academic work can and does happen, and include the digital in the range of possibilities. Core to these discussions of practice were motivations to engage. There was no one correct way to do this mapping, as individual variation in motivations is a crucial factor in understanding practice.

It is in our discussions of motivations, both to be present and highly visible online and also to be absent or less visible, that we elicited

notions of what it means to be 'authentic' and 'credible' while online. We ask the delegates 'where are you online' so that we can also ask the questions, 'What does "Identity" mean?'; 'What are the implications of "being yourself"'; and 'Who are "we?"'

In higher and further education, 'we' does not circumscribe a homogeneous group anymore (even if senior management roles continue to be held largely by white and male people). Frequently 'leadership' acts much like the word 'professional' does, as a means of stripping our individuality away from us (Walker, 2013). Who we are in society follows us online (McMillan Cottom, 2015). Who we are also has implications for what we feel we can or should do when we are online. Concerns about identity are shot through discussions of online practice.

We have a sense from the conversations that delegates have while in this part of the course, that leaders are aware that they perform aspects of themselves, with notions of what is 'appropriate' in mind. 'Being yourself' online can mean a range of things, and during the course we do not propose a monolithic model of online behaviour. People show different parts of themselves in different places, and that is a human phenomenon that we attempt to frame as perfectly acceptable.  While '… we value those moments where we find the antidote to the uncanniness of the disembodied Web in what we perceive to be indisputably human interactions' (Lanclos and White, 2015), there are risks to being online that impact disproportionately on women, people of colour, or any category of person who has less access to the cultural and social privileges that accrue to white men.

Pseudonymous accounts, or separate personal and professional accounts, emerge in the mapping practices as ways to manage some of the perceived risks of being 'too human' (and therefore vulnerable) online. But Stewart (2012) makes the salient point that 'on the Internet everybody knows you're not a dog', that is, it is increasingly difficult to actually hide who you are from the people who want to find out:

Contrary to much of the digital identity scholarship of the 1990s, which tended to emphasize the fluidity of identity uncoupled from the gendered and signified body — the "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" theme — the concept of networked publics has given rise to a far more enmeshed notion of reality. (Stewart, 2012)

We also facilitate discussion around the fact that whether they choose to be online or not, some aspect of their identity is being put online, either by their institutions or in the 'data exhaust' that their voluntary online activities leave behind, to be harvested by corporations such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon. If we assert that a key part of leadership is a conversation, and accept that online presence is a necessary part of being able to engage in conversations, then who you are (perceived to be) online is a crucial component of successfully engaging with people, not just broadcasting information. If leadership is a conversation, this needs to be considered in both physical and digital places, with a critical understanding of what engagement and conversations looks like, and the role of identity and notions of authenticity within them.

### Visualising Practice and Change

We built the individual digital practice elements of that first programme around what delegates gained from doing the Visitor and Resident mapping process (Lanclos et al 2016)**.** At the time, we were intent on getting people away from assumptions that digital capability was defined by their identities, especially their 'generational identity' (Lanclos, 2014), and thought that the V&R model gave them a new place around which to orientate the conversations we wanted people to have about their practices.

For the most part, we were correct. We did have, and were able to facilitate, conversations that went beyond both top-ten tech lists and 'I am X identity,' and brought people together for conversations about what they want and need to do, and what their motivations are. In the setting up of the V&R model we were careful to discuss them as modes of behaviour, not identity types. However, we have continued to see, through three years of iterations of the course, an impulse to pigeonhole, to identify themselves and others as 'visitors' or 'residents'; creating a barrier to freeing themselves up to having new conversations around the digital.

As much as the metaphor freed us from the tyranny of generational stereotypes, it opened up a debate around the nature of what it means to be 'resident' or 'visitor', with participants asking what is 'right', what is best, and how to become more of one or the other. This was never

our intention. Substituting the stereotype with a metaphor still, to some extent, obfuscated the real aim — to discuss practice in context. It is difficult to move people away from value judgements around practice, and harder still when they are using language that seems to involve personal identity.

On the programme, we want our leaders and future leaders to have a more nuanced understanding of what it means to practice in a time of ubiquitous digital. We have arrived at the point where we need to go beyond metaphor (White, 2018). Rather than annotating a metaphorical model with allusions to practice and motivation, we will start with the practices, behaviours, and motivations we want people to reflect upon.

The use of tension pairs to uncover behaviours and practices has proven effective as a baseline for change; a visual tool for identifying where both individuals and organisations are in their digital practice and their motivations, and — most importantly for the digital leaders programme — where they want to move their practice on to. The new iteration of this element of the workshop will be more tailored to support delegates in identifying the most appropriate tension pairs for their context.

Rather than using the visitor-resident continuum as one axis, we intend to provide a range of continua composed of actions and behaviours — instead of identities. For example, we might suggest that leaders map themselves against a broadcast — engagement axis. We might even solicit tension pairs from the room. We think this small modification to the leadership course format will make it easier to dig into the important content that has always been a core part of the program: an engagement with practice and current behaviours, developing the delegates' strategic thinking about the ways they want or need to change what they are doing, and what role, if any, digital tools and places can play in those changes. We think it is time in our work in the first place to give people opportunities to visualize and develop their approaches to and within digital environments, in order to focus on what people want to do. Identity is always an important part of why and how people do what they do, but it doesn't have to over-determine their practices. Our intention is to open doors, not close them by making people think that certain paths are closed because of who they are.

In between the running of the last course we facilitated (in late winter 2018) and the writing of this chapter, we have piloted a different practice mapping template, one that tries to centre people's practices as a way of initiating discussions around modes and motivations.

Fig. 13.1 Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos, Mapping triangle (2018), CC BY 4.0. The interior of the triangle is where people map the practices that are bounded by their institution and the work they do in institutional digital platforms and places. The exterior of the triangle is where they can map everything else — what they do that is not bounded by the institution. This can be their personal lives, or their work that does not take place in official channels, but rather on the open web, in self-hosted or commercial platforms

As of April 2018 we have run 4 different workshops using this template, and we found that in a swift hour's workshop we did not struggle with conversations trying to figure out 'which thing am I?' and could instead fast-track the discussion to what doing academic work, and otherwise being, in online places meant for them.

Fig. 13.2 Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos, Triangle map with annotations (2018). Image used with permission of participant, CC BY 4.0

As with the earlier mapping techniques, we still have people annotating their maps — we have lately been having success using emoji stickers so that people can signal how particular web spaces and tools make them feel, which then leads to discussions of the difference between the kinds of things within and around the digital that people have to do, and what they want to do. The intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to engage with email, social media, blog posts, and other web places are part and parcel of any individual's digital presence. This kind of annotation process helps create a space in which people can examine what practices do and don't serve them particularly well, and then consider what, if anything, they might be able to do to change things.

### Modelling Behaviour — Leading Change

Running the leadership course in a way that focuses on practice, process, culture, and motivations (rather than tools and skills) has yielded a valuable perspective on leadership and the digital in higher education. We see in the feedback about the course that people appreciate the chance to engage in something more than 'how-tos' and 'top-tips' (even if that might have been what they were initially expecting when they signed up for the course). Many of the conversations around digital practices in higher and further education tend to be fairly operational, despite all of the things we do to enable discussions around motivations and meaning behind why they do social media.

There are still not enough places to talk about the ethical implications of human processes happening online, and we struggled even as we ran the course to provide time for such discussions. Being online cannot fix, and often amplifies, the problems of racism, sexism, bullying, and abuse of power among the people who are in those online spaces. It is incumbent on institutions to make sure that conversations about online presence are not simply about concerns such as 'where can I also have conversations with my students'. During the leadership course, we try to also create a space for addressing the continued care we need to take with vulnerable populations who don't necessarily have the same license to 'simply' be themselves and have the same conversations online than a white cishet man would. There is a lot more at stake, and a lot more risk for a black woman on Twitter than a white man, even when they are saying the same things.