Social Media In Class! How Does That Work?

The Networked Knowledge Activities Framework (NKA) will be useful to educators who are trying to find ways to incorporate social media sites into the formal classroom environment. The framework outlines six activities that users participate in while they are participating in online activities. Online users collect, curate, share, broker, negotiate, and construct knowledge using the information they find on the internet. Collection refers to the process of saving a link for an item so it can be found and used later. Users curate information by creating organized collections of online artifacts. Users share informations that has been collected or curated in an online forum. These activities and their descriptions provide educators with a starting point when they are attempting to embed social networking sites into classroom activities. Brokers act as agents between networks of people. Learners negotiate to come up with shared meaning and understanding. Finally some learners construct new products with the information they have collected. These new products can be shared with others. 

These activities do not occur in isolation. It is entirely possible to see several of these processes taking place during one foray into the online learning.  This framework is beneficial because it gives educators a tool that can show how students are benefitting from the inclusion of social networking sites in the formal classroom environment.

• Dennen, V. P., Word, K., Adolfson, D., Arechavaleta, V., He, D., Hsu, C.-W., Hur, J., Jung, D., Kent, H., Russell, A., & Toth, K. (2020). Using the networked knowledge activities framework to examine learning on social networking sites (Links to an external site.). In P. Kommers & G. C. Peng (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on Web-based Communities and Social Media 2020 (pp. 165-172). IADIS Press.