ABSTRACT
This case study explores what K-12 students learn from a 13-week class activity about attracting attention to civic issues on social media. This research responds to calls by scholars of civic education to expand notions of civic engagement and digital citizenship, which often have focused on urging students to protect their reputations in digital spaces. In contrast, the learning activity examined here encourages community-oriented digital citizenship, preparing students to inform and possibly empower social change. This study is grounded in Cognitive Flexibility Theory, which focuses on learning in ill-structured domains such as public social media. Further, the study builds on the increasingly popular idea of the Fifth Estate, which posits that people acting in civic ways in public spaces can be a powerful check on government, playing a role similar to that of journalism institutions, sometimes referred to as the Fourth Estate. Data collected in this study included a pre-survey, a written reflection and post interviews with 4 students as well as artifacts such as social media posts. Students employed two main strategies to draw attention to civic issues on social media: audience-signaling and networking. Further, students learned to seek credible and diverse information using class accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Finally, students offered definitions of digital citizenship and shared thoughts about how schools should teach it via social media. This study fills a gap in the research literature about K-12 teaching with social media;few prior studies take advantage of social media's affordance as a bridge between the classroom and communities outside the school. This study also illuminates learning as schools globally moved online in response to the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Background: Video-sharing social media platforms are considered prominent sources of knowledge, particularly by young people. In this study, we aimed to categorize YouTube© videos in the Turkish language according to their contents and perform an evaluation based on DISCERN criteria. Method(s): After obtaining permission from the Ministry of Health, we performed a search on YouTube© by entering the keyword "koronavirus" (coronavirus in Turkish) on December 5, 2020. The most viewed 100 videos were investigated considering view counts, likes, dislikes, video durations, and date of upload. Then, the videos were divided into four categories as Interviews, News, Documentaries and Entertainment videos. DISCERN method (consisting of 15 key questions plus an overall quality rating) was applied to videos to investigate their quality. Each component was evaluated using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (poor quality) to 5 (high quality). The groups were compared according to these variables. Also, the top 10 videos in each category were analysed in detail. Result(s): The videos cumulatively attracted 79.443.977 times and totaled 15.3 hours of duration. All four categories got low DISCERN scores (News: 2.6, Documentary: 3, Interview: 2.6, Entertainment: 2.8) indicating poor quality. The mean duration of videos in the News category was significantly shorter when compared to other categories (1,9 minutes, p<0,05). The number of mean views of videos in the Documentary category was significantly higher (n=929,999, p<0,05) than the News category (n=673,641). Entertainment videos were both liked and disliked significantly higher than the others (n=16.818, n=1.578, respectively, p<0,05). Only two government-supported public information videos could take place in the list and these videos gained the highest DISCERN scores (4 and 5, respectively). Interestingly, Entertainment videos achieved a higher DISCERN score when compared to the News and Interview videos. Conclusion(s): Social media is considered the main source of information by many individuals. However, our results revealed that people are under threat of misinformation spreading from social media. Health Organizations and social media representatives should work in collaboration to keep this platform clean. Copyright © 2022 A. CARBONE Editore. All rights reserved.