At Towson University, social media is beginning to integrate with academics.

Beth Haller, a professor in the department of mass communication and communication studies, said the Internet is a beneficial gateway for sharing information and knowledge between researchers and professors across the globe.

“Social media allows academics from around the world to forge relationships that potentially can lead to research collaboration,” Haller said. “I get research ideas and teaching examples from my Facbeook friends who have research interests similar to mine.”

Physics astronomy and geosciences professor Alex Storrs has integrated Twitter into his class by sending Tweets about anything interesting he finds when using his telescope.

McCall Finnerty, a sophomore deaf studies and speech pathology major, said that her professors utilize social media in the classrooms as well. In one of her speech pathology classes, Finnerty and her classmates were required to look up and discuss YouTube videos pertaining to their child development topic.

“It makes class more interesting and more current as opposed to reading text books all the time,” Finnerty said.

On another occasion, Finnerty and her classmates held a conference call with people from the United Nations via Skype, a social media application that allows users to chat through instant message or phone calls.

“We were talking about current events and about what was going on in their countries over in Israel,” Finnerty said.

Some students, however, don’t think the integration of social media and academics is beneficial. Cindy Tran, a sophomore art major, said that although a Facebook page for a class would be nice, she would prefer social media sites to remain separate from the classroom.

“In the long run, Facebook is a distraction,” Tran said. “If you try to add academics to it, it wouldn’t help at all.”

Haller supported her point about social media in education with an example. A researcher based in Australia who shares a common interest with Haller in a topic called ‘Disability Law in the News’ created a Facebook page. Information and content about this topic can be posted on the page by Haller and other permitted administrators for the general public to read.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, alternative metrics is a new system of measuring scholarly influence of a researcher’s work through the social Web. It aims to track interactions online, including how often a particular work is Tweeted or blogged about.  Towson University doesn’t require its faculty to provide evidence of impact, according to Haller.

“Many more academic journals have Facebook pages these days and that helps remind all of us when the latest issue is out so we can see when there are articles that interest us,” she said.