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Abstract: Social media and higher education pedagogy have enjoyed a chequered relationship, with significant debates about the efficacy of social media as a site of learning, the manager/host of an individual's learning trajectory and as a tool of facilitating collaborative learning at scale. This paper presents the exploratory findings from the evaluation of Constitution UK, an innovative civic engagement run by the London School of Economics. We argue that some of the behaviours inherent in social media learning (centred on fleeting connections, digital identity and discontinuous engagement) can create the conditions for effective learning and achievement at scale. Through the project we identified a number of challenges that social media as a learning platform and mode of learning itself pose for traditional on-line education including the role of the academic, the transformative effect of harnessing the massive and difficulties in approaching learning design in an unstructured and informal environment.
Keywords: social media, civic engagement, innovative pedagogy, participatory dynamics, digital citizenship, massive scale learning
1. Introduction
Technology has facilitated the capability of education to be delivered at a massive scale (Ferguson and Sharples, 2014). Learning at scale has presented educators with a number of significant problems around design of the learning experience for the 'massive', especially in the context of the tensions between how people learn inside and outside the academy (Brown and Adler, 2008, Weller, 2011). Frequently associated with a neoliberal policy agenda or the rise of technological determinism in the form of MOOCs, the 'massive' has alternately been perceived as a place that learners can get lost (in the form of large scale lectures) (Gibbs, 1982) or as the predominant statistic of success for online programmes, which can be formed and reformed to excite and demonstrate institutional superiority (Riddel, 2015). Higher education institutions have embraced the concept of the massive in a variety of different ways, from the ever-increasing complexity of the episodic broadcast of knowledge (supported through technology such as Lecture Capture and the Virtual Learning Environment) to the simplified narrative and structured learning journeys of MOOCs. The spectrum of learning at scale, whether it be pejoratively or supportively described as 'massive' or 'large group' has been greeted with varying degrees of hysteria, fear, zealotism, loyalty and acceptance (Davidson, 2014, Jackson...