Sociotechnical stewardship in higher education: a field study of social media policy documents

Social media use has risen in higher education, as campus stakeholders frequently access these technologies for teaching, learning, research, communication, and information sharing. With these connected, digital technologies, our colleges and universities understand there are both opportunities and threats that social media affords. Higher education has increasingly witnessed a number of challenging incidents and abuses online. As a result, a number of institutions are evaluating policies and practices to regulate online behavior and establish community standards for students, staff, and faculty. Using latent semantic analysis, 36 universal topics are extracted from the 250 policy documents. This study not only establishes reference database of social media policy documents representing ten countries, it also forms the ontology to develop the framework foundation of sociotechnical stewardship to support strategic, long-term technology planning for organizations and their stakeholders.