Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 304

recognize the differences between these sites and
the different ways that students might use these
sites to learn, unlearn, and relearn (see Boyd
2009a, 2009b for an interesting discussion of the
differences between MySpace and Facebook).
Social media researchers have differentiated
between friendship-driven and interest-driven
types of participation in social media and social
networking sites (Ito et al., 2010). While social
networking tools like Twitter and Facebook at-
tract both types of participation, we have found
in our experience that Twitter attracts more
interest-driven participation than Facebook—
which was originally designed for and, to some
degree, continues to be used predominantly for
friendship-driven types of participation. We see
this changing though. Social networking sites like
Facebook want to continue to attract and support
both types of participation. Evidence of this can
be seen in Facebook's evolution from a site that
only college students joined, to their introduction
of news feeds (see Boyd, 2008) and unique URLs
(Price, 2009), to their public status updates— à
la Twitter (Smith, 2009). Additionally, Ning has
emerged as a more professionally-oriented social
networking forum that allows various levels of
moderation and monitoring to support both open
and bounded learning communities, and is being
adopted by educators as a “space for students
to ask questions about common issues, vendor
choices, favorite books, and instructional practices
within a trusted, monitored community of peers
and...faculty” (Summers, 2009, p. 50).
Even though online social networking tools
like Facebook, MySpace, and Ning began as
ways for friends to connect, they have morphed
into spaces where students can easily connect
with practicing professionals, in much the same
way as Twitter. In fact, a growing number of
people use 3rd party mash-up tools to post their
Twitter updates automatically to their Facebook
account and vice versa. One appealing aspect of
sites like Facebook in particular—due in a large
part to its overall popularity and millions of us-

ers (Wauters, 2009)—is that a growing number
of organizations and professional associations
have a presence on Facebook, MySpace, or Ning,
and sometimes on all three. For example, in our
domain, the Association for Educational Com-
munications and Technology (357 members), the
International Society for Technology in Educa-
tion (3,419 members), the International Society
for Performance Improvement (827 members),
Sloan-C (1,114 members), the Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education (1,723
members), Educause Learning Initiative (1,373),
and the American Society for Training and De-
velopment (1,913 members) all have a presence
now on Facebook. Also, online social networks,
like Facebook in particular, enable people to
self-identify their profession and interest; again,
in our domain, there is a Facebook group called
“Instructional Designers” that has 988 members.
Although younger users were historically at-
tracted to these sites, Facebook has seen a 276%
growth in users 35-54 years of age (Corbett, 2009),
with the other social networking sites reporting
similar growth and demographic shifts. With the
expansion of the social networking audience to
include professional communities of practice,
these social networking tools are increasingly
becoming forums for professional networking,
sharing, collaboration, and lifelong learning and,
therefore, offer great potential for student encul-
turation into the reflective and lifelong learning
practices of professionals.
While participating in online social networks
like Twitter and Facebook, students can develop
and practice self-directed learning and metacog-
nitive awareness skills such as making claims,
collecting evidence in support of their claims,
and evaluating and responding to counterargu-
ments from others in the network. If educators
encourage the use of social networking tools for
this type of knowledge-building activity, there is
great potential for students to reflect on specific
aspects of their learning and thinking processes,
and consider the impact of opinion, bias, contro-