Educational affordances of mobile social media : case studies of teachers' uses of WeChat at universities in Mainland China

Abstract

Affordances refer to opportunities for an educational activity that are determined and supported by perceived and actual features of a technology tool or an environment (Xue & Churchill, 2019). Despite the novel opportunities brought by mobile technologies for teaching and learning and the increasing application of social media in education, there is a dearth in empirical studies investigating the educational affordances of mobile and social media technologies in combination. In mainland China, although the government promotes the technology innovation in education, there is a gap between the policies and reality in terms of ICT pedagogy. Particularly, the ways of teachers using educational technology are more teacher-centered rather than student-centered. To contribute to the gap, the present study investigates the educational affordances of mobile social media in the context of higher education in mainland China and explore the private theories of teachers that mediate their technology integration, with an overarching purpose of developing a pedagogical framework for the educational adoption of mobile social media.

This study is a multi-case study. It spanned a period of one year with five higher education teachers recruited from four universities in mainland China. WeChat was selected as the mobile social media app to investigate the participating teachers’ technology integration as it was one of the most popular social media platforms in mainland China. Data sources in this study include classroom observation and online observation, semi-structured interviews, and documents and artifacts provided by the participating teachers. Qualitative content analysis was utilized as the major analysis approach for the data collected.

Results of this study reveal that mobile social media was integrated by the participants both inside and outside the classroom for teaching and learning. However, the ways of teachers’ application of mobile social media was more teacher-oriented than learner-oriented. This suggests that the educational use of mobile social media should be shifted from instructional to constructivist. A variety of educational affordances of mobile social media emerged from this study, which indicated that mobile social media could be leveraged for resources, activities, support, and evaluation in student-centered learning designs. To this end, a pedagogical framework was proposed for educational adoption of mobile social media in this study. It was also discovered that teachers held different predominant areas of private theories that informed and mediated their technology integration. However, these focus areas changed with the teachers’ adoption of the affordances. Reflection emerged as an effective strategy for the transformation of teachers’ private theories towards student-centered learning designs.

This study has both theoretical and practical implications. It enriches the literature on educational use of mobile social media and extends the theory of affordance in the domain of education. The framework proposed will serve as a guidance for both practice and research, to fully exploit mobile social media for educational purposes. For practicing educators, a range of suggestions are provided for constructivist integration of mobile social media to facilitate teaching and learning. Implications for teachers, school administrators, and teacher educators are also discussed.