Between a rock and a hard place: What are our students doing on Facebook and YouTube?
Neil Millington
To facilitate discussion on the current and potential use of social media in the language-learning classroom, Millington presented his research interspersed with opportunities to relate it to our own experience and situations. The aim of his study was to achieve a better understanding of the ways students are using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other sites; focus groups were utilized rather than individual interviews to get a truer, more candid picture of individual use patterns that might be exploited for language instruction.
After describing the history and growth of online communication, Millington suggested we consider the extent to which it should be encouraged as a supplementary educational tool -- whether in class time, whether included in teachers' personal networks. Other discussion topics focused on ways in which computer mediated communication was changing the language learning process and some common types of autonomous usage and popular topics as well as the variation in the amount of English used between students at different ability and confidence levels. A developing cultural awareness among wired participants, world-wide musical trends, favorite videos, various food cultures and other discussion topics further illuminated possibilities for exploitation of this new phenomenon of daily life in language teaching and learning.
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