Incorporating & accounting for Social Media in Education | Harry Dyer | TEDxNorwichED

Harry discusses how the study of Social Media can help us better understand how youth are acting and interacting both online and offline, how young people adeptly navigate a growing and increasingly diverse assortment of social media, and how we can (and must) incorporate and account for social media in the classroom.
Against the many calls and social panics insisting that we tell children to ‘disconnect’ from technology.

Harry calls for an acceptance of the reality of Social Media and the inextricably enmeshed nature of the online and offline. He highlights the increasingly important and positive role it plays in young people’s lives, how we can better understand Social Media and young people’s relationship with it, and how we can incorporate and utilise their Social Media skills in education.


Harry is a Digital Sociologist at the University of East Anglia, who achieved a scholarship to complete his Masters in Social Science Research Methods. He was then granted scholarship funding for his ongoing PhD under the supervision of Professor Victoria Carrington. His research focuses upon identity formation and performance in online Social Networking Sites. Using Actor-Network Theory along with ideas drawn from multi-disciplinary backgrounds such as Comic Book Studies, his research aims to explore how technology and site design can shape and affect the creation and maintenance of identities across a wide range of technologies and Social Networking Sites.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx