Educational and Social Benefits of Social Network Sites - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 30

to requests. In Theresa's case, she supplemented
the information she found about different colleges
from promotional materials, college Websites,
college guides, and people in her local network
with first-hand personal accounts from actual
college students she had identified and contacted
through Facebook:

American Association of Internet Researchers)
or they can be publicly available for anyone to
use and contribute.

DiScuSSion anD
recommenDationS

It kind of was, like, I had a laundry list of schools
I wanted to apply to. And so, I kind of narrowed
it down based on my conversations on Facebook
because the students on there, they feel more
comfortable telling me what they think of the
school . . . So they can kind of just share their
honest interpretations and some schools, I got
such great feedback and others, it's was just like,
well, I know not to go there. (291-296)

The case of Theresa Sommers, and that of stu-
dents like her who use online social networks
for interpersonal relationships, school-related
processes, college and career inquiry, leisure pur-
suits, community service, and 21 st century skills
development, offers several insights for human
services education and practice.

SnSs in Human Services education

Learning how to quickly mine different
types of information from a diverse but bounded
universe of social and professional contacts, as
Theresa did, may help learners develop research
and information fluency more effectively than
relying on a single authority (e.g., the instruc-
tor) or peer group for guidance. Indeed, the new
social Web is generating a particular brand of
social network sites dedicated to making the Web
more navigable and semantically organized. So-
cial bookmarking and tagging sites (e.g., http://
delicious.com/) allow their members to develop
folksonomies. Folksonomies are collections of
resources on varying topics such as educational
research, cooking, video games, computer soft-
ware, research on health conditions, tennis and
other special interests. Anyone with a special
interest can start tagging sites that relate to a topic
and add them to an existing folksonomy or start
one of their own. For instance, Citeulike.org is
a site specifically oriented towards scholarly re-
sources where groups can post articles related to
the topic they are researching and other scholars
can post articles to the same topic. These social
bookmarks can be private, shared only among
members of a particular social network (e.g.,

First, in human services education, online social
network sites might be integrated as a component
in flexible learning and human service delivery
within graduate school education, complementing
the core practicum and other integrated learning
components of university programs. Instructors
seeking to implement learner-centered con-
structivist teaching strategies may benefit from
layering an online social networking component
over traditional in-class, online or hybrid course
structures. For instance, it is well established that
large enrollment classes and online or hybrid
(partially online) courses which have high levels
of peer-to-peer and instructor-student interactiv-
ity also tend to have higher student retention,
satisfaction, and course completion. However,
typical course management systems used to sup-
port or deliver such courses, such as Blackboard
(http://www.blackboard.com/us/index.bbb), are
designed more for content delivery controlled
by a central administrator (instructor) than they
are for ongoing, multi-channel communication,
multimedia-sharing, and networking among
course members. In addition, incorporating peer-
to-peer interaction and group-building activities
is time-intensive, costly, and usually not feasible