A virtual panopticon in the community of practice: Students' experiences of being visible on social media

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.07.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Students valued community in the production of their assessable online work.

  • Students also felt conflicted as to how much of themselves they wanted to share.

  • The experience of having online work assessed is like being in a virtual panopticon.

  • Wenger's communities of practice theory can illuminate students' online performance.

  • Lecturer-student negotiation is vital in management of identity and online visibility.

Abstract

It has become commonplace in higher education for instructors to use social technologies to motivate and challenge their students and to support learning objectives. In some instances, social technologies are used to make students' assessable work visible to other people, such as peers and external audiences. This study investigates university students' responses to the requirement to make their assessable work visible online to others. Using the lens of the community of practice framework and the notion of a virtual panopticon, we analysed data from focus group discussions with 20 university students. Our findings reveal that students experienced benefits, such as being part of a cohesive learning community, but also felt conflicted about how much of their work and themselves they wanted to share. Our study highlights the importance of lecturer-student negotiation in the management of online visibility, especially regarding student privacy and identity performance.

Introduction

In online environments, social media is typically used to create and share content that is visible to an audience. Social technologies – such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and others – are now commonly used in higher education to foster and assess learning. While there has been much interest in the visibility of content online, and how it shapes the way we use social media to construct and perform identity (e.g., Baym and Boyd, 2012, Besley, 2010, Davis, 2012, Kimmons, 2014, Schwartz and Halegoua, 2015, van Dijck, 2013), there is limited understanding of how this visibility affects students when they are required to use social web technologies as part of a university assignment. Research on the use of social media in education tends to focus on their value for supporting social learning, with less exploration of how students feel about making their assessable work visible to persons other than the lecturer.

In this study we examined students' experiences of using social web technologies for university assessment tasks. Rather than focusing on the learning effects of particular social web technologies (which can vary by platform and activity among other variables: for an example, see Sun & Gao, 2017), we explored how students feel about making their assessable work visible to others. Our study addresses the following questions: what are students' experiences of making their work – and, by extension, themselves – visible on social media? How does this visibility shape – and how is it shaped by – students' participation in their learning communities? Our analysis is informed by notions of surveillance and performance outlined in Foucault's (1975) theories of the all-seeing prison structure known as the panopticon, and by key concepts from Wenger's (1998) communities of practice framework.

In this paper we use the term ‘social media’ broadly to include any web-based technologies that involve creating, publishing, and sharing content (Manca & Ranieri, 2016). We use ‘social media’ interchangeably with ‘social web technologies’ to include not only Facebook and Twitter, but blogging sites, collaborative wikis, and photo-sharing sites, realising that all of these have their own particular characteristics and are used in higher education for different purposes. In the past decade, there has been great interest in the use of these technologies to support student learning, particularly in university settings (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Bennett et al., 2012, Hamid et al., 2014, McLoughlin and Lee, 2008). Studies have reported evaluations of assignments where students use, for example, blogs as reflective journals (Farmer, Yu, & Brooks, 2008), collaborative wikis for group writing tasks (Judd, Kennedy, & Cropper, 2010; Thompson & Absalom, 2011), and social networking sites for language learning (Kabilan, Ahman, & Abidin, 2010). By sharing content, reviewing each other's work, and collaboratively producing online material, students engage in peer learning which can create supportive learning environments (Dalsgaard & Paulsen, 2009).

There are, however, a number of challenges associated with introducing social web technologies to students in higher education (Bennett et al., 2012, Dohn, 2009, Schroeder et al., 2010). Social media can be distracting and can blur the boundaries between students' learning and social lives (Smith, 2016). This blurring of traditional boundaries, which has been variously referred to as ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and Boyd, 2010, Vitak et al., 2012) and ‘convergence’ (Rambe, 2013), raises questions of textual ownership and issues concerning authentic self-expression. Assessment tasks where students review and interact with other students' work and co-create content, whether pictorial or linguistic, can become sites of tension, as students struggle to create and present authentic and consistent online identities (Dohn, 2009, Kimmons, 2014). This can result in what Foucault (1997) has referred to as the problem of the ‘author function’ where there may be no clear authorial identity associated with an individual student's work. It also creates a ‘virtual panopticon (Rayner, 2012), potentially exposing students to the constant scrutiny of others.

The notion of the panopticon originates from the work of Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century British philosopher and social theorist. He conceived of the panopticon as an ideal prison structure consisting of a tower in the middle of a circle of prison cells which would enable guards to observe prisoner activity at all times without being visible to the inmates. Although the guards could not, in reality, observe every prisoner's activity at all times, prisoners would not know if, or when, they were being watched. Drawing on the work of Bentham, Foucault (1975) theorised that this would result in an automatic functioning of power and control since prisoners' awareness of a possible audience in the panopticon would drive their actions, resulting in the creation of behavior that would always be self-regulated and performative (i.e., oriented toward a given audience). Similarly, activities on social media are always viewable by others, and so social media participants are always aware of a possible audience for their online activities. It is this that drives the performance of identity that is commonly observed in social media research (Baym and Boyd, 2012, Schwartz and Halegoua, 2015).1

For Rayner (2012), the online world is a kind of virtual panopticon, where users co-exist in asymmetrical power relationships in a virtual and visible area of confinement. The key point is that people do not always know who is watching their online activities, nor when, or indeed if, their activities are being viewed. When people post status updates on Facebook, upload YouTube videos, or contribute to a blog, the sense of being observed is an ever-present mediating force that impacts on how people construct and perform their identities online. As Schwartz and Halegoua (2015) state, it is ‘through images, video, status updates, profiles, friend lists, visible conversations, tastes and interests, and comments that appear within their profile, [that] social media participants present a highly curated version of themselves’ (p. 3, emphasis added).

To understand students' experiences of this virtual panopticon we use Wenger's (1998) theory of social learning and his concept of ‘communities of practice’. This provides a useful lens for understanding how students' experiences of visibility shape, and are shaped by, their participation in a learning community.

Over the past two decades, elements of Wenger's (1998) communities of practice framework (Fig. 1) have been used extensively to understand and explore social learning and the processes by which people come to belong to, and participate in, a learning or workplace community (Smith, Hayes, & Shea, 2017). We accept, with Wenger, that a community of practice can be distinguished by a shared domain or common focus; shared activities with joint discussions; and common practice arising from shared experience, tools and resources. His framework offers a dense conceptual and empirically based account of how connections are made between members of a community who are united by common objectives, activities and practices. Although it predates social media, the concept of communities of practice has been used to examine and explain behavior and learning in both online and offline communities (e.g., Barab, MaKinster, & Scheckler, 2003). For a review of this body of work, see Smith et al. (2017). The framework suggests that group work practices emerge and evolve over time, and that the process of learning changes who we are and influences who we become. This provides a useful lens for understanding how changes within the learning environment – such as making students' work visible to others online – affect the practices within a community.

Wenger (1998) argues that communities of practice evolve through the work of four co-present and dynamic dualities, or modes of belonging: participation and reification; designed and emergent; the local and global; and identification and negotiability. Fig. 2 shows how these dualities work together to drive learning within a community of practice.

Participation/reification, refers on the one hand to the relations within the group and the processes which shape both group and individual experiences, and on the other, to the resulting product. In our context reification is achieved through the social media artifacts that students produce. These artifacts constitute what Wenger terms ‘boundary objects’ around which group members organise their interconnections. For Wenger, the co-presence of participation and reification is essential to the negotiation of meaning in a learning task.

The second duality, designed/emergent, reflects Wenger's view that learning can only be designed for (it cannot be designed), and is in a constant state of flux, adapting to change and responding to inputs. These inputs may originate from institutional or participant activity, and create complex boundary interactions, tensions and practices. In the current study, ‘blended’ learning communities comprising face-to-face and online interactions are set up institutionally where the participants, including instructors, generate learning processes and products dynamically (see Gruba & Hinkleman, 2012, for an explanation of blended learning).

The third duality, local/global, highlights the tensions between the inherently local nature of the practices in which members of a community engage, and the broader constellations of practices to which they also simultaneously belong. Practices occur in a local context – i.e., in relation to the people and established practices of the immediate community – but may resonate differently within a wider context.

Finally, as Wenger explains, the process of defining, adapting and interpreting designs for learning ‘does not inherently entail the privileging of certain perspectives at the expense of others, but such privileging is rarely completely avoidable’ (1998, p. 235). There may be, consequently, threats to individuals' identification with and within the group: some voices may be valued over others in the eyes of different community members, including those of the assessors, as all participants engage in the struggle for control and ownership of meaning. Not all group members will be endowed with sufficient power of negotiability to participate meaningfully, which may result in some group members feeling disempowered.

Wenger's (1998) four dualities provide a useful lens for interpreting students' experiences of making their assessable work visible to others. As we describe below, Wenger's framework offers insight into the impact that assessment tasks using social web technologies can have on students' participation and identification within a learning community.

Section snippets

Research design and methodology

In this study we examined students' experiences of making assessable work visible on social media, and investigated how this visibility shaped – and was shaped by – students' participation in their learning community. We conducted focus group discussions with 20 students, who were enrolled in different courses across three Australian universities. The focus group sessions were conducted as part of a larger project, completed in 2011, that examined the use of social web technologies for

Findings

The data analysis identified four overarching themes, which we aligned with the dualities in Wenger's framework: (1) Boundaries of visibility (designed and emergent); (2) audience (local and global); (3) creation of learning artifacts (participation and reification); and (4) learning community (identification and negotiability).

Discussion

In this analysis, Wenger's (1998) four dualities of learning (or modes of belonging) are used to highlight the tensions and negotiations that students engage in when a new practice – making students' work visible to others – is introduced into the learning community. As Wenger (1998) emphasises, we cannot design learning; we can only design for learning. In curricula that advocate social learning, designing for learning may involve introducing social web technologies into the learning

Conclusion

Wenger's (1998) communities of practice framework help us to understand how students come to participate in and belong to a learning community, and how a learning community evolves or emerges over time. The dualities provide a lens through which we have interpreted how students' experiences of making their assessable work visible to others shaped their participation in the learning community. This visibility certainly appeared to affect how students participated in their learning communities,

Funding

Support for this publication was provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Ltd. (PP9-1350), an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (later, the Office for Learning and Teaching – OLT).

The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the OLT.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the 20 student focus group participants from universities in Melbourne, Australia who were willing to share their experiences with the wider academic community. We thank Ellen Leather for her valuable support in drafting the figures included in this article.

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