Social Media in Education

[socialmediained-blog]

Social media are fundamentally changing core practices in various industries. Although surveys indicate that social media are impacting social scientists, we know little about how education scholars, specifically, use social media for their work or professional learning. This article explores how educational scholars incorporated the social media, Twitter, as a conference backchannel. Using qualitative interview data collected from members of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and considering previous analysis of AERA conference tweet data, we describe participants’ purposes and practices and their perceptions of how using this social media impacts participation in the conference community. We discuss implications for those concerned with research dissemination, faculty professional development, and academic identity.

[borislavkiprin]

Homo-Appians - The Average Daily Life of an Android App User #infographic

[socialmediained-blog]

Reading List: Using Social Media for Research Collaboration and Public Engagement

The bulk of discussion around why academics use social media primarily focuses on social media as a dissemination strategy to get more citations and views of scholarly articles. But social media ha…

[socialmediained-blog]

Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of current social media research tools

The popularity of social media sites and the ease at which its data is available means these platforms are increasingly becoming primary sources for social research. Wasim Ahmed presents a quick lo…

[socialmediained-blog]

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.

[socialmediained-blog]

“Hahaha” is a common way for us to express laughter in words, but how do people around the world do it in their respective...

[socialmediained-blog]

New Study Shows Armchair Activists Actually Make a Difference

[socialmediained-blog]

In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into how participants’ usage and perception of social media in their online learning experiences differed and why. We identified that, although some participants benefitted from social media by crediting it, for example, with networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, others objected or refused to engage with social media, perceiving it as a waste of their time. We make recommendations for the usage of social media for educational purposes within MOOCs and formal digital learning environments.

[socialmediained-blog]

Traditional, top-down professional development (PD) can render teachers mere implementers of the ideas of others, but there is some hope that the participatory nature of social media such as Twitter might support more grassroots PD. To better understand Twitter’s role in education, we conducted a survey of K–16 educators regarding their use of the microblogging service for professional purposes. Respondents described multifaceted and intense use, with PD activities more common than use with students and families. This paper delves into qualitative data from 494 respondents who described their perspectives on Twitter PD. Educators praised the platform as efficient, accessible and interactive. Twitter was credited with providing opportunities to access novel ideas and stay abreast of education advances and trends, particularly regarding educational technology. Numerous respondents compared Twitter favorably with other PD available to them. Members of our sample also appreciated how Twitter connected them to educators beyond their own schools and districts, with mention of exposure to both like-minded and diverse perspectives. Respondents described positive and collaborative professional activity facilitated by Twitter, and many noted how it helped them combat various forms of isolation. We conclude by discussing implications of the survey results for educators, researchers and policy-makers.

[socialmediained-blog]

Research on microblogging in education has suggested its potential to promote community building and collaborative learning, but little is known about the nature of interaction in such microblogging communities. More research is needed to understand how online learning communities can be designed in a way that supports effective learning. The purpose of the study is to explore how people interact in a popular microblogging-based learning community by examining a one-hour synchronous chat event and analyzing its network structure, levels of participation, major topics generated and types of interaction. The findings suggested that the levels of participation in the synchronous chat were largely uneven. During the chat, participants were engaged in many types of interaction and discussed a variety of issues related to the topic. Interestingly, people who were different in their levels of participation also varied on the types of topics generated, but not on the types of interaction.

[socialmediained-blog]

Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning - Christine Greenhow & Cathy Lewin

New literacies practices of teenage Twitter users - Benjamin Gleason

Using Facebook as a co-learning community in higher education - Marta Cuesta, Monica Eklund, Ingegerd Rydin & Ann-Katrin Witt

Technology, time and transition in higher education – two different realities of everyday Facebook use in the first year of university in the UK - Eve Stirling 

Self-regulated learning and social media – a ‘natural alliance’? Evidence on students’ self-regulation of learning, social media use, and student–teacher relationship - U. Matzat & E.M. Vrieling 

Online content creation: looking at students’ social media practices through a Connected Learning lens - Cheryl Brown, Laura Czerniewicz & Travis Noakes

[socialmediained-blog]

A new survey from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found that 40 percent of the professors surveyed use or are interested in using innovative techniques and technologies. But of that 40 percent, only half—or 20 percent of the overall survey sample—have actually used them.

[socialmediained-blog]

3 Tips for Capitalizing on Your Students’ Digital Literacy Skills - Top Hat Blog

Digital literacy is one of the few skills that we don’t formally teach in the classroom, probably because it is one of the few skills that the students are more comfortable with than the instructors. I have never had to hold a class of the proper use of hashtags. Nor have I ever been forced to discuss the intricacies of the Facebook “like” vs “dislike” buttons debate. Surprisingly, I have never once thought, “you know what we need in this class, a close examination of Vine videos”…Maybe I should start thinking this way, because the literacy that I learned with a pen and pencil has long since been replaced by the language of daily communication: digital literacy. This new-age literacy comes out of the rise of integrated social networking. To clarify, this network has become all encompassing. Every time you..

[socialmediained-blog]

Ignoring social media means a pre-service T becomes a dinosaur before ever setting foot in a classroom.

Ben Owens @engineerteacher (Twitter)

[socialmediained-blog]

“While most young people regularly consume and produce social media content, many schools focus on what students should not do with these technologies rather than address what students and teachers can do. The authors share ways that some educators leverage social media to enhance the who, when, where, why, how, and what of educational processes.”