RESEARCHWINDOWS
Tapping the Wealth
of Social Networks
for Professional Development
Christine Greenhow
Christine Greenhow
is a Harvard-trained
educational researcher
and former school
teacher at the University
of Minnesota, where her
work focuses on how
people learn, teach, and
collaborate with emerging
technologies such
as social network sites.
Learn more at
www.cgreenhow.org.
Last fall, when New York Times technology
writer David Pogue wanted to learn about
the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter, he turned to his network, sending “tweets”
to 1,900 followers. He found that social networking, if not used judiciously, could be a massive
time-absorber, but he also found that technologies such as Twitter could be a “brilliant channel
for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures
you admire. No other communications channel
can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.” In his January 15, 2009,
blog post, “Twittering Tips for Beginners,”
Pogue wrote:
A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for
a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As
the judges looked over one particular application, someone asked, “Hasn’t this project
been tried before?” Everyone looked blankly
at each other. Then the guy sitting next to
me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the
question to his followers. Within 30 seconds,
two people replied, via Twitter, that it had
been done before. And they provided links.
The fellow judge had just harnessed the
wisdom of his followers in real time. No
e-mail, chat, Web page, phone call, or FedEx
package could have achieved the same thing.
I was impressed.
Today, information and communication technologies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are some of the most popular technologies
available on the Internet, with millions of users
worldwide, but research is still trying to discover
how we use them, for what purposes, and in
what settings, and investigate how they may
be shaping the ways we think, work, and
communicate.
Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler in The
Wealth of Networks examines the ways in which
such technologies available over the Internet
enable extensive forms of collaboration that
may have transformative consequences for the
economy and for society. He argues that through
emerging forms of online participation, we can
not only publicize our opinions, and so have a
hand in shaping our democratic culture, but also
become more critical, self-reflective, and collectively intelligent.
If this is true, as reflective practitioners, how
do we start enjoying the wealth of networks—
tapping our collective intelligence—for our own
personal and professional development in education? In our increasingly online world, can we
get a little help from our friends?
A recent and thorough review of the professional development research literature from one
of the education field’s top journals, Review of
Educational Research, argues that in terms of
technology professional development for educators, we still have a long way to go in understanding methods of effective practice: “We need
to move to a more systematic study of how technology integration occurs within our schools,
what increases its adoption among students and
teachers, and the long-term impacts that these
investments have on both teachers’ and students’
learning.”
Moreover, the research on teachers’ uses of the
kinds of freely available, online-all-the-time social digital technologies that Benkler and others
