Abstract

The student population of today has a vast array of technology at their disposal compared to the student population of 10 years ago. What is however, highly significant, is how the students engage with the social media that is available and how aware they are of the digital passport they are creating. This presentation examines how Virtual Learning Environments, once ‘locked’ into an Institution have now expanded to include Facebook, YouTube, twitter, technerati and numerous other public blogs and wiki’s. Students regularly post and engage with these media for communication without anticipating the consequences of their input. Within the lecture generated, there is the opportunity to capture immediate student feedback on examples of where social media had either backfired or caused harm and distress. The intention is to make them, aware of how, what may seem funny amongst a small group of friends would not pass positive messages to a potential future employer. The theoretical underpinning of this presentationcomes from Biggs and Tang (2007) where they talk about the changing scene in university teaching and Brenton in Fry et al (2009) in writing an introduction to e-learning. It is crucial to differentiate for the students between ‘communicating in learning spaces’ and general social media.