New Media, and social media in particular, offer new sites for learning, literacy sponsorship, and writing. The panelists in this session explore how these outlets are being used both within the classroom and by outside organizations, to support and invigorate learning and literacy practices.

1. Integrating Social Media into
Online Educational Spaces:
Modeling Professional Practice in
Instructional Interactions
Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher
Leadership, Policy & Adult &
Higher Education
brad_m@ncsu.edu
Ashley R. Kelly
Communication, Rhetoric, &
Digital Media
arkelly2@ncsu.edu
NC State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
Computers & Writing 2012

2. Social media in instruction: Outline
 Audiences for social media
 Social media history
 Opportunities and challenges of
social media
 Emerging social media literacies
 Contested writing spaces
 Struggles in contested spaces
 Instruction and professional writing
as humanistic
 Rhetorical professional writing
instruction
 Challenges to a humanities
orientation.*
Downloaded from:
Sirona Says Blog (2008). Available online: http://blog.sironaconsulting.com/sironasays/2008/06/social-media-ro.html
*To download this presentation, see http://www.slideshare.net/bradmehlenbacher/

3. Audiences for social media
 Interviews with 1,753 (12+) people in 2010 indicate that 48%
have profile pages on Facebook, LinkedIn (75% = 18-24).
 30% use social networking sites several times/day
 By 2008, 48% of 3054 Internet adults have visited video-
sharing applications (double last year)
 400 million active Facebook users; 106 million Twitter users
 Frequent social networkers are active and group-oriented
learners and watch less TV
 Social media are difficult to categorize, to compare, and to
describe in terms of their functional goals
Adopted from:
Cheung, C. M. K., Chiu, P-Y., & Lee, M. K. O. (2011). Online social networks: Why do students use facebook. Computers in
Human Behavior, 27, 1337-1343.
Miller, C. C. (2010). Twitter loses its scrappy start-up status. The New York Times, April 15. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/technology/16twitter.html
Rainie, L. (2008). Video sharing websites. Project Data Memo of the PEW Internet and American Life Project. Available
online: http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2008/Pew_Videosharing_memo_Jan08.pdf.pdf
Stross, R. (2010). Getting older without getting old. The New York Times, March 6. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/business/07digi.html?_r=1
Webster, T. (2010). The social habit—Frequent social networkers. The Edison/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Study 2010.
Somerville, NJ: Edison Research.

4. Social media history
 Hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of social
networking applications
created since 1997
Adopted from:
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 13 (1), 210-230. Available online: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
ethority’s comprehensive social media graphic at http://www.ethority.de/weblog/social-media-prisma/
(see also http://www.go2web20.net)

5. Opportunities
and challenges
of social media
Adopted from:
Arola, K. L. (2010). The design of Web 2.0: The rise of the template, the
fall of design. Computers and Composition, 27 (1), 4-14.
Boston, I. (2009). Racing towards academic social networks. On the
Horizon, 17 (3), 218-225.
Bilton, N. (2010). Price of Facebook privacy? Start clicking. New York
Times, May 12. Available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?pagewa
Griffiths, M., & Light, B. (2008). Social networking and digital gaming
media convergence: Classification and its consequences for
appropriation. Information Systems Frontier, 10 (4), 447-459.
Lange, P. G. (2008). Publicly private and privately public: Social
networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 13 (1), 351-380.
Lundin, R. W. (2008). Teaching with wikis: Toward a networked
pedagogy. Computers and Composition, 25 (4), 432-448.
Maranto, G., & Barton, M. (2010). Paradox and promise: MySpace,
Facebook, and the sociopolitics of social networking in the writing
classroom. Computers and Composition, 27 (1), 36-47.
Young, K. S. (2004). Internet addiction: A new clinical phenomenon and
its consequences. American Behavioral Scientist, 48 (4), 402-415.
Zimmer, M. (2008). Preface: Critical perspectives on Web 2.0. First
Monday, 13 (3). Available online:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2445/2213

6. Emerging
social media
literacies
 Current strategies for
integrating social media
into educational spaces
 Social media use is
always changing (non-
stable), instructionally
and professionally.
Adopted from:
Coppola, N. W., Hiltz, S. R., & Rotter, N. G. (2002) Becoming a virtual professor: Pedagogical roles and asynchronous
learning networks, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18 (4) 169–189.
Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robinson, A. J. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory
culture: Media education for the 21st century. An Occasional paper for digital media and learning. MacArthur Foundation.
Available online:
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/{7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E}/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

7. Contested writing spaces
 “What unites and distinguishes these digital writing
environments from those in print is their materiality–their
existence through the hardware and software that shape
their design or what Lessig (2006) calls ‘architecture’” (p.
508)
 “While digital writing spaces are coded in diverse ways,
they all exist in and through digital technologies, and as
such they enable, constrain, challenge, reproduce, or
question established practices, social orders, and
hierarchies rooted in print materialities while also offering
alternative practices and social orders to those established
around print” (p. 508)
 “Each new discursive space … is a unique constellation of
participants and digital software codes” (p. 403).
Adopted from:
Starke-Meyerring, D. (2008). Genre, knowledge and digital code in web-based communities: An integrated theoretical
framework for shaping digital discursive spaces. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 4 (4), 398-417.
Starke-Meyerring, D. (2009). The contested materialities of writing in digital environments: Implications for writing
development. In R. Beard, M. Myhill, J. Riley, & M. Nystrand (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of writing development (pp.
506-526). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

8. Struggles in contested spaces
Struggles over
Equal access
Intellectual property and sharing
Privacy and surveillance
Implications
Policy engagement and research attention: “what student
writers, citizens, and others will be able to access, build on,
what kind of knowledge they will be able to make (p. 520)
Reconsidering writing pedagogies, policies, and
infrastructures: “that allow students to critically analyze and
engage in the design, use, and regulation of the … spaces
they inhabit” (p. 522).
Adopted from:
Starke-Meyerring, D. (2008). Genre, knowledge and digital code in web-based communities: An integrated theoretical
framework for shaping digital discursive spaces. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 4 (4), 398-417.
Starke-Meyerring, D. (2009). The contested materialities of writing in digital environments: Implications for writing
development. In R. Beard, M. Myhill, J. Riley, & M. Nystrand (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of writing development (pp.
506-526). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

9. Instruction and professional writing as
humanistic
 Tacit positivist assumptions of both science and technical
writing pedagogy leads to view of writing as superfluous
—“technical and scientific writing become just a series of
maneuvers for staying out of the way” (p. 613)
 However, “Facts do not exist independently, waiting to be
found and collected and systematized; facts are human
constructions which presuppose theories” (p. 615)
 This view of writing as epistemic and transformational
highlights invention, agency, genre, and community
 Instruction too becomes argument, construction, critique
 A non-rhetorical professional writing classroom
emphasizes (rules, procedures, methods, technical
“accuracy” and “completeness” and single authorship of
uncontested scientific and technical “facts”).
Adopted from:
Miller, C. R. (1979). A humanistic rationale for technical writing. College English, 40 (6), 610-617.

10. Rhetorical professional writing
instruction
 A rhetorical professional writing
classroom
 Focuses on critical role of rhetorical invention,
investigative and symbolic technologies and
processes of emergent knowledge (writing as
epistemic)
 Critiques scientific and technical objectivity as
driving principles in the construction of
arguments/texts
 Examines various materialities and spaces,
contested and established
 Highlights audience, community, and
participation (“concepts, values, traditions, and
style”)
 Assesses and critiques reductivism and
determinism in scientific and technological
contexts and cultures.
Adopted from:
Miller, C. R. (1979). A humanistic rationale for technical writing. College English, 40 (6), 610-617.

11. Challenges to humanistic orientation
 What we do now (skills-based training) is a reaction to the
anti-intellectual privileging of STEM disciplines inside and
outside the academy and driven by funding and budget
cuts (and threats of further cuts)
 Adjuncts, instructors and other non-tenure track faculty
hoping to re-conceptualize as humanistic their
professional writing classes may face bureaucratic and
negative feedback (or worst individual reprimand)
 We are inadvertently colluding to render our discipline
irrelevant by ignoring the principles, theory, history, and
convictions of humanistic disciplines.
Adopted from:
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NY, NY: NYU Press.
Brown, M. (2011). The Sciences vs. the Humanities: A Power Struggle. The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11.
Available online: http://chronicle.com/blogs/old-new/the-sciences-vs-humanities-a-power-struggle/336
Wright, J. (2012). Debating higher ed: STEMs, skills, humanities, and hiring. Newgeography.com, February 9. Available
online: http://www.newgeography.com/content/002661-debating-higher-ed-stems-skills-humanities-and-hiring

12. Thank you. Questions?
 Mehlenbacher, B. (2010). Instruction and
Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Mehlenbacher, B., McKone, S., Grant, C., Bowles,
T., Peretti, S., & Martin, P. (2010). Social media for
sustainable engineering communication.
SIGDOC’10: The 28th ACM International Conference
on Design of Communication. São Carlos-São-
Paulo, Brazil: ACM Press.