"Friending" Vygotsky: A Social Constructivist Pedagogy of Knowledge Building through Classroom Social Media Use

Social media and web 2.0 technologies are an attractive supplement to the higher education experience and are embraced as a way to foster intra-and extracurricular knowledge generation among a class community. However, these collaborative media require a rethinking of the theoretical framework through which we engage student communities of practice. This paper offers a social media-age rethinking of Vygotsky's (1978) conceptualization of social constructivism within learning communities by presenting two case studies of instructor uses of social media platforms through a Facebook community of practice and a wiki-based, student-generated exam. Each examines the pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of incorporating social media in course curricula through the development of social constructivist-based best practices in Web 2.0 course environments.