Technological utopia, dystopia and ambivalence: Teaching with social media at aSouthAfrican university

Abstract

The discourse of social media adoption in higher education has often been funnelled through utopian and dystopian perspectives, which are polarised but determinist theorisations of human engagement with educational technologies. Consequently, these determinist approaches have obscured a broadened grasp of the situated, socially constructed nature of human interaction with educational technologies and failed to explain ambivalent positions of technology adoption. To contest the innate determinism embodied in the aforementioned technological views, this paper draws on technological ambivalence to unravel the complex, multiple possibilities in pragmatic use of technology-including the double-bound relationship between human agency and educational technology. A phenomenological approach that draws on self-narratives of the use of social media by Computer Science and Informatics educators at a South African university is employed to unravel how their perceptions of social media shaped and informed their pragmatic instructional uses of these technologies. Findings suggest that the sharp contrasting experiences of collaborative engagement, enactment of decentralised power and democratic expression in social media coexist recursively with the disempowering, dependence-ridden and distractive effects of these technologies. This technological divergence is further compounded by ambivalent views that neither celebrate the unrealistic hopes of social media nor grossly protest against the debilitating effects of these technologies. This view foregrounds the social embeddedness of technology and its potentially multiple, contradictory effects. The implications of these findings include the need for educators to consider social conditions of technology use, the alignment of such conditions with innovative social media-enhanced pedagogical models and the use of proven models to demonstrate the educational potential of social media technologies.

Social network use and youth well-being: a study in India

“…Internet addiction has been described as a twenty-first century epidemic (Christakis, 2010). There is growing evidence that because of their hyperlinked architecture social media can prove more distracting than focusing (Aagaard, 2014;Anderson et al, 2014;Rambe and Nel, 2014). Along with this, other research has provided clear evidence that overuse or maladaptive use of ICT can have negative effects on the well-being and psychological functioning of children, adolescents, and young adults (Brooks, 2015;Fox and Moreland, 2015;Rosen et al, 2013;Sampasa-Kanyinga and Lewis, 2015).However, social media is simply providing a quicker peeling of the onion as in majority of the cases the issues were anyway there and most people anyway love to talk about themselves.…”

Podcasts: A technology for all?

“…However, we have also found that this does not have to impact on their ability to access the technology necessary for learning. On the contrary, as others have shown, students are resourceful in finding complex and nuanced ways of engaging with technologies for teaching and learning within broader structural conditions (Czerniewicz, Williams & Brown, ; Rambe & Nel, ). The results however also show that not all students can rely on their own mobile technology to access podcasts and that the institutional provision of computer labs might still be an important aspect in terms of providing an equitable access to technology for all students.…”

Fisheries Volume 43 Number 3 March 2018

“…Collaborative, constructivist modes of teaching may be enhanced by social media. However, the research is scattered and mixed, exposing possible dystopian and utopian views (Rambe and Nel 2015 ;Manca and Ranieri 2016 ). When we consider the educator ' s perceptions and facility with social media, a utopian view is not certain; rather, many dystopian views are possible depending on how and why social media is implemented in instruction.…”