Embracing Social Media Technologies for Sustainable Digital Pedagogy

Digital nativity is rapidly replacing digital immigration as teaching and learning in today's classrooms, at all levels, (primary, secondary and tertiary), progressively enter the digital landscape. In this new landscape, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Google Circles and other social media sites are rapidly becoming the preferred media of intellectual exchange among students rather than simply tools of recreational and conversational dialogue. In this new landscape, institutional technophobia of social media is rapidly waning as there is an increasing realisation of the compelling need to restructure our pedagogical approaches so that they cater adequately to the current and future needs of our students. One of the ways to meet students' demands in this digital landscape of the 21st century is through embedding social media technologies in standard constructivist pedagogy. This paper discusses the author's experiences of introducing the lise of Google+. Discussion Circles in both an undergraduate and a doctoral degree program at one University in Australia. The results reveal that the application of social media as instructional and learning tools has significant potential to engage students' learning in more interesting, exciting and motivating ways that enable these technologies to provide sustainable development intellectually.