Teaching African American Students
Ingrid Sturgis
5/8/2012
Leveraging Social Media to Enhance AfricanAmerican Students’ Learning
Media adoption
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NEOMILLENNIAL LEARNING STYLES
College students and gadgets
Trends in education
• 1 million children (2 percent of the K-12
student population) are participating in
some form of online learning
• 27 states offer statewide virtual schools
that allow students to take a class online
• 24 states and D.C. offer students an
opportunity to attend a virtual school fulltime.
Trends in education
• As students become more connected to each
other through various online mediums, they're
also becoming more untethered, with laptops
and smart phones keeping them physically apart.
• “Web 2.0 paradigm" of "immersive
environments" and dynamic information could to
upend traditional pedagogies and even the way
students learn.
• That could mean that some professors might
have to play catch-up
Student trends
• New methods of interacting with information will
become more ubiquitous
• Students growing up with different expectations
and preferences for acquiring knowledge and
skills
• Less emphasis on "sage on the stage” linear
acquisition process focusing on a "single best
source”
• More focus on "active learning" that comes from
synthesizing information from multiple types of
media
Social media trends
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83% of Americans have mobiles
42% have smart phones
,500,000 Android devices activated daily
Foursquare passed 10 million users
Twitter 200 million, 1 billion tweets/day
Facebook 800 million active users
Google+ passed 43 million users
Google search 1 billion users
Where we are now
In last 10 years:
•Internet population more closely resemble the
racial composition of the U.S. population.
•Proportion of Internet users who are black or
Latino has nearly doubled—from 11% to 21%.
African Americans have made up substantial ground when it
comes to home broadband adoption.
At the same time, African-Americans
remain somewhat less likely than
whites to go online.
Laptop ownership by African-Americans rose
fairly dramatically over the last year -- from
34% in 2009 to 51% now
Blacks continue to trail whites in
broadband use at home.
Also quite a bit less likely than whites
to own a desktop computer
HOW DO AFRICAN-AMERICAN
STUDENTS USE SOCIAL MEDIA?
Where we are now: Mobile
• Blacks and English-speaking Latinos more
likely to own a mobile phone than whites.
Mobile gap
Prof. Craig Watkins:
•“There is always this impression
that black and Latino youth,
particularly those who live in
deprivation and attend less-high
performing schools, have a lag in
their use of technology and their
engagement with it.”
•“But, in some ways, they are even
more assertive in their desire to be
part of the tech world. Young
African Americans are the early
adopters of the mobile web.”
Mobile
• Minority adults use wider range of their cell
phones’ capabilities.
• More likely to use mobile devices to:
• Text message (70% African-Americans and
English-speaking Latinos use text messaging, vs.
just over half of whites)
• Use social networking sites
• Use the Internet
• Record and watch videos
Mobile, cont.
• Blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely
to use their mobile devices to:
• Make a donation via text message
• Use email
• Play games
• Listen to music
• Use instant messaging
• Post multimedia content online
Smart phone use
Mobile roots in hip hop
• The way young African Americans create
personal spaces with mobile technology is
similar to how hip-hop evolved.
• Rely on a “do it yourself” ethic and free
sharing of media via peer-to-peer
communication.
• “A lot of what young African-American people
know about new media, they’ve taught each
other.”
Mobile access
• Mobile is also a more reliable access point —
especially at home, where connections can be
spotty (particularly in poorer households)
• “Mobile has enabled them to assert a greater
degree of control over their engagement and
participation in the digital media world.”
Texting
• The volume of texting among teens has risen
from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the
median teen text user.
• Older teens, boys, and blacks are leading the
increase.
• Texting is the dominant daily mode of
communication between teens and all those
with whom they communicate.
Texting
• Heaviest texters are also the heaviest talkers.
• The heaviest texters (those who exchange
more than 100 texts a day) are much more
likely than lighter texters to say that they talk
on their cell phone daily.
Social media use
• Minority adults outpace whites in use of social
technologies.
• Seven in 10 blacks and English-speaking
Latinos use social networking sites—
• Six in ten whites do so
• Nearly half of black Internet users go to a
social networking site on a typical day. Just
one third of white internet users do so.
Social media use
Minorities are also relatively likely to use digital
technologies to keep up with what’s happening
in their neighborhoods.
• This is especially true for folks who don’t know
their neighbors by name.
•Blogs, social networking sites and
neighborhood listservs can serve as tools for
keeping up with local issues.
Racial differences in social media
Social media use
• Minorities were very active using social
technologies to share info during the 2008
election.
• Minorities more likely to say government
outreach using social media “helps people be
more informed about what government is
doing” and “makes government more
accessible.”
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WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA DO AFRICANAMERICAN STUDENTS PREFER?
Twitter
Who tweets
• 34% of African-American
teens
• 11% of white teens
• 13% of Latino teens
• Lower income teens
(under 30K hhd inc)
more likely than
higher income teens.
• Girls more than boys
Who tweets
Twitter
• One quarter of African-Americans use Twitter,
significantly higher than the 15% of whites
who do
• English-speaking Latinos are right in the
middle, with 20% using these Twitter
Twitter
• Users are more interested in connecting
with public figures.
• One in ten Twitter users (11%) say that
reading comments by politicians,
celebrities or athletes is a major reason
they use online social networks.
Facebook saturation
Facebook
Facebook
Internet vs. Facebook
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Professors’ Use of Technology in Teaching
Academia and social media
Professors’ use of technology
in teaching
Professors’ Use of Technology
in Teaching
Professors and social media
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WHY USE TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING
Disruptive technology
1. Not going away: The Internet is here to stay. Now in Social
Media revolution
2. Professional development
3. Creativity will be rewarded – jobs, careers, reputation
4. Will alter higher education as we know it
5. The power To engage
6. “Meet them where they live!”
7. Businesses want to hire workers who understand the
Internet
University of Phoenix
Open University, UK
Khan Academy
Changing learning
How can faculty use social media to
enhance teaching and learning
• The closer the connection to course content, the more
valuable the use of social media
• Be mindful of the student privacy
• Model appropriate academic uses of social media: YouTube
shown for scientific experiments, scientific blogs, etc.
• Stress connections between print media and electronic
media: blogs that became books, video or interactive essays
by academics, etc.
• Plan for discomfort when classroom authority is disrupted
• Create clear criteria for grading and evaluating work that uses
digital media
Has use of social media proved
effective for African American students?
Introduction to uses of technology
Can offer more engagement in learning
Offer support in online courses
More research needed in this area
What are the risks of integrating
social media in courses?
• Privacy vs. public: Create a separate account just for your
classes. Keeps your Facebook relationship at school on a
professional level.
• Manage privacy settings: Friend students carefully. Keep as
professional a distance on Facebook as you would in person.
• Ask students to put you on limited access to their pages.
• Create lists, then keep students in each class on that list to
organize your students.
• Always-on student-faulty interaction
A few ways to use social media
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Social media tips
• Keep up with news through Facebook on
groups like World News Now that provides
video clips of world news.
• Political science students can become fans of
politicians in order to learn about their
platforms.
• Participate in a challenge. Look for challenges
like the one held by Google, Microsoft and
others.
Social media tips
• Create groups. You can create groups for
entire classes or for study groups
• Schedule events with Google Calendar,
Facebook.
• Share multimedia content
• Make a quiz
• Post class notes and assignment.
Social media tips
• Facilitate classmate connections.
• Brainstorm via Facebook or Twitter.
• Get access to guest speakers via Skype or
Google hangouts or reach out to guests via
Facebook.
• Incorporate your class blog. If you have a class
blog, import it to Facebook so it shows up
there when you add a new blog post.
Who to follow
Linkedin
Google docs
Google
• Create or import documents spreadsheets and
presentations addition to documents.
• Share documents with collaborators.
• Create syllabus with a spreadsheet and a
calendar app
• Create online quizzes/surveys
• Set up class appointments with calendar
Google +
Resources -- storage
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Zoho
Dropbox
Google Docs
Box.net
Youtube
Resources
• http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/02/100-ways-toteach-with-twitter/
• http://www.pearsonlearningsolutions.com/educators/pe
arson-social-media-survey-2011-bw.pdf
• http://techcrunch.com
• http://mashable.com
• http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words
• http://www.readwriteweb.com
• http://www.blackweb20.com
• http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/
• http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/
• http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=156905
Resources
• http://www.babson.edu/News-Events/babsonnews/Pages/110412-survey-finds-more-than-ninetypercent-of-college-faculty-use-social-media.aspx
• http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Teens-andsmartphones.aspx
• http://www.emergingedtech.com/2011/03/facebook-inthe-classroom-seriously/
• http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Digitaldifferences.aspx
• http://mashable.com/2011/08/18/social-media-students
• http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reflections-onteaching-with-social-media/24556
About me
• Ingrid Sturgis
– Assistant Professor/New Media at Howard
University
– Fellow: The Knight Digital Media Center's Web
2.0 Training for Journalists
– Fellow: Dow Jones Multimedia
– Fellow: Knight News Entrepreneur Bootcamp
– Senior Programming Manager AOL (formerly
America Online)
– Editor, Essence.com
– Managing Editor, BET Weekend
THANK YOU
INGRID STURGIS
isturgis@howard.edu
202-806-5124