r/Classroom

I talk a lot about Reddit, especially about its potential (as I see it) as a dialogic learning tool with a distinctly relevant appeal for interesting students in critical thinking on their own turf, as I argued last week. Now it's time that I take a minute to show you what Reddit is; how does Reddit work as a social media site, and what is it about Reddit that I find so exploitable for my pedagogical purposes?

Reddit is, put simply, a discursive forum for sharing content and engaging in conversations about that  content.  "Content" can be generally divided into two types: Primary or Secondary.

Primary content is that which is original (to varying degrees) information or production generated by the user (called Redditors). This sort of content is often either artifactual, such as a picture, gif, or video clip, or textual, written narratives, anecdotes, and/or personal reflections.

 Secondary content is that which has been found on some external area of the web by a Redditor, and taken into the Reddit community for the sole purpose of sharing with other Redditors.

Ultimately, the end goal for sharing either Primary or Secondary content is the conversation that it sparks. A post's "success" is measured by how popular it is in the Upvote system (comparable to Facebook likes) and by how broad and deep the web of comments from other community members grows to be (comparable,  to Facebook comments)--so Upvotes and comments function as direct feedback, as discourse facilitation,  as capital for determining the Redditor's standing in its internal social structure, and finally as reward or incentive for the Redditor's participation.

This is what the Reddit home page looks like:

The content that you see on your homepage is customized according to the themed subreddits to which you have subscribed, with the most popular new content appearing first. Redditors pick and choose which posts to investigate based on their evaluations of the very little information, a title and a small preview, that they are given. Now zoom in...

This is an example of primary content. When you click the title, this is what you are directed to:  a photograph that the user captioned, uploaded (to imgur, a web utility created especially for this purpose), and then linked to.

But look what happens when, instead of the title, you click where it says "123 comments"...

And now you see in a nutshell how Reddit functions. The site is inherently discursive, with the two dimensions of discourse being found in the post and the comment thread. And while Redditors, like anybody, have a lighter side---they enjoy the casual posts, like the one pictured above, where the post and comments are given value purely for its utility as a source of amusement--the discourse that can be found on Reddit has an established critical side as well. See below.

This is a secondary posting; the title links to an external news story. But the comments section, rather than being a venue for jokes and surface-level feedback, becomes a space for engaging in mindful public discourse:

Granted, in the typical example of the discursive Reddit thread, arguments tend to be rife with logical fallacies and there are frequently individuals that attempt to undermine the authentically critical attempts at other users with disruptive wisecracks, etc. It’s not a perfect system—but it’s already captured interest as a social media site, and established a precedent for stimulating a degree of social critique and critical discussion. It takes only the careful efforts of a teacher to encourage the discourse to delve deeper, draw on sources, and craft their responses. 

Congratulations, you now (hopefully) have a deeper understanding of Reddit and can follow along as I set up my idea of how to incorporate Reddit as a legitimate blended learning tool, drawing largely on theories of postmodern influences on education as justification. 

In The Theory and Practice of Learning (2004), Jarvis set up for the reader a thorough understanding of the changes that occurred on a larger, social level as we moved from the modern to the post modern era, and also detailed what some of those changes meant specifically for the field of education and learning. He reminds us that “modernism and the consequential educational model arose from specific social conditions” (19, emphasis added). In the modern context, such characteristics as strong emphasis on the values of nationalism, objectivity in scientific and especially social scientific study, and a significant emphasis on the use of education to transmit profitable, technical knowledge and skills and reinforce society’s dominant cultural values, made sense and were appropriate to the time. 

Society has been moving on since about the 1980’s, however, and while some traits of modernity still remain, as Jarvis asserted, “the social conditions from which education arose—and within which it functioned—are being replaced. The new conditions call for new and different concepts of learning (19).”

In this Postmodern age we have been impacted by rapid globalization, a changing and aging demography that appears to be pulling away from traditional domestic models and working-class trends, and a growing value on individualization. People no longer believe they have to conform to external values or traditional lifestyles, which is affecting their career aspirations and motivations for seeking an education. 

Postmodernity has also seen a breaking down of the distinctions between high and low culture; the lines that once separated pop-culture and the bourgeois are diffusing and knowledge can be extracted from and applied to just about any area of interest. I believe this effect, which Jarvis called fragmentation, reflects an increased value for non-conformity and deciding for oneself the value of both knowledge and culture.
 

Culture and style themselves have become commodities , and are replacing traditional cultural values as one’s capital and evaluative criteria. Our attention has turned away from the glorification of production and communication, and the media, have instead become the basis of society (19). Reddit can be seen as just one of many examples of this, as a community that gathers individuals for the sole purpose of engaging in discourse and media and social commentary. 

A major way that this postmodern condition has impacted learning is by challenging the idea of knowledge itself.  Jarvis explains how truth itself is now increasingly accepted as relativistic even in fields like science, ideology, and religion, and as a result the educational curricula which were governed by discrete assumptions of truth are taking the shape of reflexive, experiential learning. The teacher is no longer a bona fide expert who gives knowledge, but takes on the role of facilitator who helps guide people on—not what—but how to learn effectively, and increasingly the learners are charged with discovering and determining knowledge for themselves. Finally, reflecting again upon the blurring between high knowledge and pop culture, the learners, not the teachers, have become the ultimate judges of what is significant and in good taste.
 

The general learning attitude has shifted as well; students do not expect to re-hash dry blocks of information that has no relevance to their life, but expect to engage concepts that are critically significant. Generally speaking, an attitude of ambivalence has replaced the dogmatic certainty of the discrete disciplines and the unquestioning acceptance of knowledge  (22), and so “learning itself must be reconstructed on a much more individualized basis” (22). 

How do we do that using a tool like Reddit? The book explores three models of learning that begin to answer this question, especially when integrated into a final approach to the medium: Experiential Learning, Self-Directed Learning, and  Distance Learning. None of these alone is sufficient framework for incorporating Reddit, but each gives us objectives and assumptions to be met that a thorough understanding of Reddit functionality allows us to plan ways to fulfill. 

Experiential Learning

Experiential learning operates under several premises (56): that our experiences stimulate our learning, and that experience is that which we learn from; that learners actively construct their own experience, and so their reflections upon experience are not objective but subject to the influence of cognitive processes, memory, and context, and as such learning is socially and culturally constructed and should be considered holistically.

A classroom should endeavor to address these assumptions by creating opportunities for learners to reflect on their own experiences in conjunction with a provided learning objective. Students should practice both critical reflection on their own, primary experiences as well as on the secondary experiences that are shared by their peers in dialogue. The objective is to navigate these mediated experiences to an end point where learners develop their own conclusions about the experiential significance. 

Reddit provides just the mechanism for sharing experiences of all senses; not just an anecdote of an actual experience which a learner has lived, but experiences that he or she has had with bits and pieces of visual and auditory media that they have discovered or been exposed to, and experiences that are created within the discourse itself, the collaborative processing experience.  This exemplifies the student-centered classroom learning approach which “endeavor(s) to use students past or recalled experiences and to provide primary and/or artificial experiences from which they may continue to learn” (66). 

Self-Directed Learning

Adopting a blended teaching approach requires a comprehensive rethinking of your pedagogical philosophy to make it work, especially in a situation like this which focuses significantly on student experience and constructing learning through communication.  The instructor must step back from his role as the authoritarian information giver and become a facilitator, and to do this you have to have trust in your students to take more accountability for their own learning. 

Jarvis reviewed several important studies on self-directed learning, including the framework by Malcolm Knowles that really hails self-directed learning for its importance to the lifelong learning perspective. According to Knowles, it’s important to teach self-directed learning because it stimulates better learning, in a way that traditional educational models cannot do in the postmodern deinstitutionalization of learning.

To this idea, Brookfield (1985) added that self-directed learning is inherently tied to the social context that the student brings with him or her to the learning environment, positioning self-directed learning perfectly for objectives that are critically and socially contingent. 

So to implement Reddit as a learning tool, instructors must arrange a course structure that motivates individuals to take the initiative in forming their own learning goals, identifying the appropriate materials for learning, and evaluate their learning outcomes.  Jarvis provided us with some specific strategies through his review of researcher Allen Tough’s work that can particularly help in facilitating self-directed  learning when using Reddit. 

First, the curriculum itself must be created with self-learning in mind. Blend the contexts; use face-to-face class time early on in the term to establish supportive networks for the learners, allow them to group naturally as they learn how to use the site.  Have learners create their own learning contracts, so that each may see specifically what they intend to accomplish by the end of the semester and can monitor their progress in concrete terms through the term.

When using Reddit, the facilitator should create the course’s own subreddit and organize it as best as he or she sees fit: Reddit allows for infinite strings of subreddits embedded with subreddits, so if it suits your purposes best to divide threads up by earning group or by unit, theme, or concept, just make sure to implement an organization system consistently so as best to minimize confusion and maximize visibility.
 

Be an active Redditor yourself. Provide resources at the top of each subreddit relating to its personal theme that can be used as reference material for the posters, establish rules and guidelines for postings, but be a significant presence in submitting content and commenting on other discussions as well. This is the instructor’s best opportunity for providing direct and guiding feedback, while standing on relatively equal footing with the learners gives them more motivation to direct their own conversations. 

Ideally, the equitable power structures and system of trust will give students internal motivation for taking responsibility for their own learning, while learning contracts, assessment, and comprehensive instructor feedback throughout the process will stimulate motivation in those who are not naturally so self-directed. In both cases, I argue that employing Reddit as a learning environment adds its own element of motivation and engaging interest for learners, so as to make the task of eliciting self-directed learning that much easier.

Distance Learning

Finallly, Jarvis provided us with a list of distance learning resources that, in my opinion, Reddit is particularly suited to handle. To fully engage a NewGeneration audience, like that which would be the most engaged by the use of Reddit as a learning medium, he suggested adopting a comfortable teaching presence that incorporates easily readable, moderately dense resources and colloquial language. The strictly conceptual material is up to the instructor to control for these factors, while the rest of the material that learners will be studying in this environment—the content that one another posts to the community as living texts and examples for critique—will almost always already be in an understandable format, thanks to the diffusing lines between high knowledge and popular culture and the interest that students have in applying concepts to pop culture and real world texts. 

Jarvis advises that implementers of a distance learning method invite learners to exchange views and create an open environment that stimulates freedom of questioning, commentary, and opinion and feedback giving that attempts to involve the student on a level of personal or emotional interest. Giving students the freedom to select their own content will ensure that content appeals to students on this personal or emotional level, and the entire Reddit structure is constructed to be free and inviting to dialogue, and is clearly successful in stimulating that. 

In order for the instructor to maximize the effectiveness of this distance learning tool, he or she does need to remember to draw a clear and explicit line connecting themes and content to the desired concepts, which it is the duty of the facilitator to do through his own participation in the social-learning mechanism. 

I hope that I have drawn a clear justification of using Reddit as a blended learning tool by connecting it back to principles of learning in the postmodern condition, a context from which this present age of blended learning and globalization is inextricably bound. Experiential learning, Self-directed learning, and distance learning are just a few themes to emerge from this new school of thought that offer clear strategies for instructors to adopt; strategies which I have applied not just to blended learning but to the specific context of Reddit.  Perhaps you can share now in my vision of the discursive opportunity for engaging, self-directed, and experiential learning for which Reddit is a wealth of untapped potential, and one that I am excited to use at the soonest feasible opportunity.