Pitfalls of Social Media
- Social media use has remained disparate due to the digital divide, even in the technologically advanced regions of North America and Europe (Selwyn, 2012).
- Majority of social media users rely on the already existing content on sources such as Wikipedia and YouTube, without contributing to the creation and updating of content (Selwyn, 2012).
- Some educators feel that the social media platform blurs the personal and professional roles of faculty members and students (Lockyer & Patterson, 2008).
- Use of social media can lead to misinterpretation of information amongst the students and the instructor since there is no access to facial expressions, body language, vocal tone, and volume (Junco & Chickering, 2010).
- Another barrier that people face with social media is the time factor. Some students and instructors are not well-versed with the use of new technologies and need extra time to master technology in order to integrate it with efficient content learning (Lockyer & Patterson, 2008; Tess, 2013).
- Rodriguez (2011) argues that with social media, there is “no standard way of addressing intellectual property rights of student work” (p. 542) and that “when using social media tools in the classroom, the strict definition of original author or owner is blurred” (p. 542).
- Rodriguez (2011) discusses that classroom discussions that are posted in an online social media forum have the potential to be available to a world audience and there are important privacy concerns to be considered. The content created online or comments that are posted by students even though they are restricted to class participants can be stored or archived by anyone that has access and this creates the possibility that they could resurface later.
- Employers these days keep a track of the facebook pages of potential employees and students need to be wary of posting sensitive and controversial content online (Abe & Jordan, 2013). These reports raise concerns on privacy and ethics.
- In order to deal with these pitfalls, colleges and universities are revising their social media policies and the issues under consideration are “authenticity and transparency”, “protecting confidential information”, “respecting copyrights”, “developing a social media strategy”, “respecting your audience” and “obeying terms of service on specific platforms” (Petroff, 2010).