Social Media in Tertiary Education: Considerations and Potential Issues

What Is Social Media?

At the core of social media is what Miller et al. call ‘scalable sociality’ (2016); two scales that describe the way in which people associate with each other to form social interactions or relations through social media (Miller et al., 2016). The first scale allows users to control the level of privacy for a group or audience “from the most private to the most public” (Miller et al., 2016, p. 3). The second scale allows users control over group size “from the smallest group to the largest group” (Miller et al., 2016, p. 3). These two scales can operate separately or together to determine the privacy and size of the group used for its purpose. They also describe the basic general function of social media applications and platforms in terms of the scope and size of the intended audience and how students can control and govern their audiences. Since the technologies utilized for social media will no doubt change in the future, the scales assist in describing the nature of social media regardless of the underlying technologies used in its creation. In terms of educational context, the scales can assist in describing and determining the size and scope of educational activity. They can also assist in the description of the difference between teacher- created, student-led and student self-created educational activities. While these scales assist in the description of what makes media social, they do not define it.