Towards an Information Sharing Pedagogy: A Case of Using Facebook in a Large First Year Class

Introduction One of the challenges of teaching first year classes is addressing the tensions between educators' teaching strategies and student conceptions of learning. This challenge is compounded when a social networking environment, which is a de facto social interaction space, is used as a teaching and learning environment. In these contexts, it is difficult to recruit student participation without learners feeling that their social space is 'invaded' and becoming uncooperative. The quest to develop an Information Sharing Pedagogy based on learners' social networking environment is, therefore, fraught with challenges of redundant postings, limitations of collective responsibility, subtle negotiations of power between educators and learners, and confusion of roles among novice learners. Cohen's (2009) Informing Science framework provides a way of analyzing the role of Facebook in mediating information sharing among students who assume interchanging roles of informers and clients. The need for the informed to also inform is not a typical practice of informing science frameworks, as Birdsall (2009) observes that an Informing Science framework ought to take cognizance of the right of the informed to also inform. The use of Facebook among learners reinforces the rights to inform (informer) and be informed (client) and such interaction leads to rich knowledge resources based on multiple voices. However, the freedom that learners experience in Facebook, when exercised in traditional face-to-face classroom sessions where expert (informer) regulation of learning activities is often privileged creates conflicts. Unlike Learning Management System's (LMS) collaborative tools such as discussion boards and chats, which learners often conceive as provided by the institution and open to educator manipulation and regulation, learners usually perceive Facebook as a technology in their control. Normally, students exercise discretion with regard to when and why to open Facebook accounts, make personal decisions on the comprehensiveness of their personal profiles, the personas to project (whether to use real names or quasi-pseudonym), number and diversity of "friends" (personal contacts) to have, and the extent of privacy of their Facebook accounts. Therefore, if not lecturer-controlled, Facebook presents a "student-regulated space" (Rambe, 2009) that augments existing forms of direct lecturer-student interaction and potentially encourages students to voluntarily participate in this space. More so, unlike discussion forums that are usually accessed via the LMS, Facebook is accessed anywhere, anytime by students from their mobile phones. In social networking, informers and clients interchange roles to create "online knowledge" (Cartelli, Miglio, & Palma, 2001) based on real life experiences. Real life experience blends both formal and informal knowledge. Cartelli et al. (2001) contend that the new technologies create an intersection of everyday experience and scientific knowledge. Birdsall (2009) observes that clients can either be participants in an informing process or play a pivotal role in the design and development of an informing process. To the extent that users of Facebook engage in information sharing and manipulate the Facebook environment depending on the target audience of messages, they construct the informing process and are informed by it. Cohen (2009) calls for channel-focused research that involves heterogeneity of informing networks in which informers and clients are a collection of agents as opposed to "a single informer and a single client through a single channel" (p.11). It can be inferred that Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook, facilitate dynamic interchange of roles between informers and clients and blend informal with formal knowledge. Although Facebook is a "tool of action in everyday life" (Rasmussen, 1996, p. 98), the lack of Information Sharing Pedagogy makes knowledge artifacts from multiple users who share everyday experiences difficult to be integrated and used in the classroom. …