Does the social web encourage students to collaborate, communicate, and co-create or to disengage, slack off, and participate in some high-tech high-jinks?

Over at Harvard University, some students share lecture notes. This is not exactly shocking news. They’ve been doing it for a long while—it’s nearly an unofficial tradition, and one that, if we did a quick student survey, we’d find has been repeated at every college and university in the country for several generations. Students share notes, and textbooks, and pens, and just about every piece of educational technology – except maybe their cell phones.

But recently Harvard note-sharers got headline coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, because the note-sharing has migrated online, and not all the professors are happy about it.  In fact, some faculty go so far as to claim that online notesharing sites, “serve as a crutch for students who haven’t bothered to attend class or take their own notes.”  There’s something about the public nature of online resource sharing that raises professors’ hackles and suspicions. Perhaps this knee-jerk reaction is based on a prejudicial view of social networking as being all about play and not about school, or work, or any of that serious stuff.

For millennials who have grown up digital on Facebook and MySpace, collaborating and connecting, sharing and comparing resources via their social graphs is commonsensical. This is how they consume music, video, news stories, and other entertainment media—and they approach school and work tasks the same way. In other words, for digital natives, peer-to-peer production, open-sourced and crowdsourced models of media use are part of everyday life. It’s an attitude and approach to work and life that is certainly not about being disengaged, unmotivated and lazy, but quite the opposite. Millennial students are by and large passionately interested in webs of influence, being plugged-in and connected, and adding value to their social nexus.

From this perspective, the challenge is for educators to stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media,” according to Nicholas Bramble in Slate magazine. Rather than blocking social media development and stifling or dismissing the economy of sharing in higher ed, faculty members should figure out how to leverage and incorporate students’ tech skills and their eager willingness to share as part of the curriculum.

So how can educators channel that creative energy and collaborative spirit? We can return to Harvard for some advice, this time to the Business school. There authors John Beck and Mitchell Wade published their research about the impact of the gamer generation on the workplace in a book called The Kids Are Alright.  Among other things, GenY students prefer to “learn from the team, not the coach,” according to Beck and Wade, who suggest that gamers love working together and helping each other, excelling at cooperative work and play.  For professors then, developing opportunities for students to work together in teams, to design online slide presentations, or curate and design multimedia blogs, would be examples of assignments that build on, rather than resist, the way digital natives prefer to study.

As is often said by public relations experts who make their living advising individuals and companies about reputation management: if you do not actively shape your public communications and online representation, someone else might do so for you. If you’re lucky, perhaps it will be your happy and satisfied clients who are motivated to do so.  On the other hand, it could be those who feel otherwise about your products or services who manage your digital presence—damaging your brand in the process. But what does this PR advice and talk about brands have to do with the classroom? Educators, even those who do not subscribe to the consumer model of education, can take this advice to heart. If the students are going to share notes about our classes on Facebook or some other social media site, clearly this is an opportunity to give course credit for collaborating on a “branded” course note wiki, in public or privately via the LMS.

The bottom line here? By making the curriculum and learning process more social, it is likely that millennial students will feel inspired to invest more, not less, effort in their educational endeavors. Far from being a “crutch” for the apathetic, social media technologies can be a scaffold supporting innovative and creative, self-directed and peer-to-peer learning initiatives.

image credit: by googlisti on flickr