Using a social networking site for experiential learning: Appropriating, lurking, modeling and community building

Furthering the study of the use of SNSs in a classroom setting. This study points to some critical issues with using CMC for accomplishing various classroom goals. The study chose Ning as the SNS for some important reasons. The purpose of the course was to acclimate the students to using CMC and build a familiarity with them so that they could then decide if and how to implement CMC as a educational tool in their own classrooms. Their were a number of different goals and they were met with varying degrees of success but that in itself illustrates the point that CMC is a tool not a solution, and selecting the right tool for the goal you want to accomplish is most important. The choice of Ning was made because its free and relatively easy to use, something a public school teacher would have access to. The lack of enthusiasm over the chat feature brings up the point that a synchronous chat feature is perhaps not the best tool for teaching new languages. I was pleasantly surprised at the notion that lurking had educational value. Learning by watching is a valid method and lurking in a chat forum or blog seems to me to be no different. The first time I got on Reddit (a forum) I had no idea how to go about posting and what was the common language of the site. I spent about 4 weeks just reading posts before I felt comfortable enough with the community to post myself.