This journey of ‘Social Media in a BCM World’ is coming to a close, and there is a lot of new and interesting information that I have learned on the subject that I am excited to share! So I am going to dive right in!
On this journey, I asked many questions to my peers in the forum of a survey, and on twitter. I asked questions such as;
- Do you find the use of social media in the BCM degree helpful?
- How does the use of social media as a platform for assignment submission make you feel?
- And, on a scale from never to always; how often does social media distract you from your work?
- And more.
These are all personalised questions, to gain a deeper understanding of the data that I had been collecting. While in my preparation stage of this project, I stated that I would try to make sure the questions were the collective rather than personal, especially when talking about mental health. However, once I reached the stages of asking the questions, I realised that most of my questions would not have felt evasive to the person completing the survey, and made an executive decision to use personal pronouns for easier data collection.
While I believe that social media within our degree, with some adjustments, is helpful, I believed the outcome of this project would show that students would disagree with me. This was one of my most interesting outcomes. The students seemed to come to a common agreement — without knowing it, that with some restrictions, social media can be used as a grading source. The students find that social media can often become a distraction. Upon reflection on my own experience, I find it easier to remove my phone from my studying equation altogether. This might be a similar experience for some students.
The students seem to believe that there needs to be a little more restrictions on the use of social media for education purposes, for there are distractions aplenty that become quite addicting. They do not seem too concerned with the ramification of a consistent use of social media, but this could be due to a lack of education on the matter. For my own future reference, or if I could I add something to my project, it would be little more information on the ramifications of social media usage, so that the students are well educated on the matter. But, they are concerned with the lack of restrictions in this area. Possibly, there needs to be a further acknowledgment that it is being used for education purposes on both the students and educators parts.
My evidence on any statements I make are limited, however, due to a small response group. This has limited the strength of my arguments. However, I have, luckily, received differing response from each students in my small response group. This has made my question; “On a scale of never to always; how often do you find yourself becoming distracted by social media?” very interesting. While one unnamed source answered that 90% of the time they are distracted by social media, another answered that 30% of the time they are distracted. These are the outliers, with the rest of the group resting in the middle. This brings the average to 57%. A statistic such as this one should not be left ignored. This means that more than half the time, for most students, they are distracted by social media rather than being focussed on their work. All the while, the BCM degree is encouraging and marking the use of social media, though I find it helpful most of the time. This is a possible call to acknowledge these kinds of statistics, even small ones such as these.
So, where does that leave us, and how can it be applied to the student experience in the BCM degree? From the small amount of data that I have collected, I can see that restrictions need to be made for a better educational experience on social media. As well as acknowledging that social media can be quite distracting, therefore meaning that need not be the only form of marking in a given class.
Lilli Hessenberger 