Christine Greenhow

Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literacy Practice

Abstract This article defines Twitter tm ; outlines the features, affordances, and common uses; and conceptualizes “tweeting” as a literacy practice, comprising both traditional and new literacies, and impacting both informal and formal learning settings. Also provided is an overview of traditional and new literacies, and insights from a scan of the research literature to date on tweeting as a literacy practice. The authors outline areas for inquiry and the challenges to conducting such research.

Social Media and Education: Reconceptualizing the Boundaries of Formal and Informal Learning.

It is argued that social media has the potential to bridge formal and informal learning through participatory digital cultures. Exemplars of sophisticated use by young people support this claim, although the majority of young people adopt the role of consumers rather than full participants. Scholars have suggested the potential of social media for integrating formal and informal learning, yet this work is commonly under-theorized. We propose a model theorizing social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Through two contrasting case studies, we apply our model together with social constructivism and connectivism as theoretical lenses through which to tease out the complexities of learning in various settings. We conclude that our model could reveal new understandings of social media in education, and outline future research directions.

Scholars and social media: tweeting in the conference backchannel for professional learning

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.

Re-thinking scientific literacy out-of-school

Scientific literacy can be fostered in informal, out-of-school social media contexts.Young people argued socio-scientific issues in a Facebook (FB) application.Argumentation in FB demonstrated skills seen in formal learning contexts.The article discusses implications for the design of informal online learning. Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook.com, are the dominant technology-mediated leisure activity among teenagers in different countries, prompting researchers to explore their suitability as learning tools, largely in formal higher education settings, and with mixed results. In contrast, this paper examines whether an open-source social networking application implemented outside of the school context engaged young people (ages 16-25) in debating socio-scientific issues. A multi-dimensional approach to analyzing argumentative knowledge construction in a designed Facebook.com application yielded insights about the presence and nature of young peoples socio-scientific issue argumentation along four process dimensions (participation, argumentative, epistemic, social co-construction). We discuss the implications of these findings for computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) theory and the design of similar applications that attempt to supplement formal learning or bridge formal-informal learning settings.

Adolescents’ visions of their future careers, educational plans, and life pathways: The role of bridging and bonding social capital experiences

This study investigates the experiences and life aspirations of adolescents based on interview data collected from primarily first-generation high school students in three Midwestern suburban and rural towns (N = 43) using a social capital framework. We explore adolescents’ descriptions of experiences that represent new or different careers, cultures, and life paths and how they talk about their future professional and educational aspirations. Our participants were exposed to new possible careers, cultures, and life paths from both online and offline experiences, such as study abroad, online gaming, and some uses of social media. Online networks that primarily reflected offline connections, such as Facebook, were less likely to provide these experiences.

YOUTH, LEARNING, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Returning from a conference on a flight from Dallas, I was struck by how, on a seemingly daily basis, we witness accounts of people altering conventional practices and connecting in new ways using emerging web-enabled technologies. As e-books outsell hard covers by over 40%, I should not have been surprised by Delta passengers tapping into the free Wi-Fi via their iPads and reading electronic book titles layered with links to extra content such as videos, the author’s spoken commentary, and increasingly, social reading options, such as note-sharing, social highlighting, real-time book discussions, ratings, tags, and links to Facebook and Twitter (Watters, 2010). We are witnessing similar trends in education. In the last 10 years, Internet access, the nature of the web, and contexts for learning have been transformed, and new desired competencies for learners, teachers, and administrators have emerged. Such shifts have impacted constructs for learning, instruction, and paths for future research (Greenhow, Robelia, & Hughes, 2009a, 2009b). Internetconnectivity in schools, homes, neighborhoods, and communities has become increasingly pervasive, enabling expanded sites for formal and informal learning. Moreover, technological advancements have contributed increasingly to young people’s adoption of social media, a term often used interchangeably with Web 2.0, to refer to online applications which promote users, their interconnections, and user-generated content (Barnes, 2006; Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008). Ninety percent of school-aged youth now use the Internet regularly, with over 75% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 using social media (DeBell & Chapman, 2006; Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008; Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005).

Like, Comment, Share: Collaboration and Civic Engagement Within Social Network Sites

This chapter explores the unique forms of collaboration and civic engagement that are enabled by online social network sites (SNSs) within informal and formal learning settings. We highlight emerging research in the learning sciences and digital media and learning fields that illuminate the new possibilities for collaboration and civic engagement offered by this emerging social media. Here we focus especially, but not exclusively, on online SNSs and social networking applications. We offer two examples of SNSs that support collaboration and civic engagement in such spaces and beyond them and discuss their implications for educators and researchers. Finally, we conclude with a set of questions that will drive the research in the next decade.

First-Generation Students and College: The Role of Facebook Networks as Information Sources

Social network site (SNS) platforms have the potential to be effective information-seeking channels due to their technical and social affordances, such as the ability to broadcast content to a large group and to aggregate ones contacts. This study tests the impact of a Facebook app that allows users to visualize their network of Facebook Friends to see how it influences who adolescents identify as good sources of information about college. Comparing Friends selected by 24 high school seniors before and after viewing Facebook network visualizations reveals that first-generation students were more likely to select higher quality information sources among their Facebook Friends after exposure to the visualization. Our results suggest that social media can help users identify good human information sources by making hidden resources in ones network more visible.

The social scholar: re-interpreting scholarship in the shifting university

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a re-envisioning of traditional conceptualizations of scholarship informed by knowledge assets theory, trends shaping the modern university and technological advancements. We introduce social scholarship, a set of scholarly practices being envisioned within the conventional four domains of scholarship (i.e. discovery, integration, teaching and application). This paper provides concrete examples of the benefits and challenges of enacting social scholarly practices in light of Boisot’s theory of information flows, proprietary knowledge and the social learning cycle. Design/methodology/approach – This article is a cross-disciplinary conceptual exploration. Findings – In the model of social scholarship, access to knowledge is spreading faster than ever before; information flows are bi-directional in each domain (discovery, teaching, integration and application) where previously knowledge resided with the institution, flowing out to the public. Relationships between scholar...

Guest editorial for special section on teachers and learning with social network sites

The evolving knowledge society and the emergence of information and communication technologies in our lives present complex challenges for educators and policymakers worldwide. Education requires adjustments to these changes in learning and teaching, in the shattering of boundaries, as well as in providing new meaning to emerging educational paradigms facilitated by uprising interfaces. One of the most salient examples of the need to address unfamiliar educational scenarios is social network sites or social networking sites (SNS). Some argue that such sites are used predominantly to connect with those one already knows and less for traditional Bnetworking^ purposes (Boyd and Ellison 2007). Others prefer the term social networking sites and point to sites such as LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) which are used primarily for Bnetworking^ or building one’s list of personal contacts. We use these terms interchangeably and define SNSs as Web-based communication environments through which individuals can maintain existing social ties and interactions and develop new social ties with individuals outside their network (Ellison et al. 2014). SNS-based communication plays major roles in this change, extending the scope and settings in which teachers and students communicate beyond school boundaries in terms of time, space and definition of roles (Greenhow et al. 2015, 2009; Greenhow and Robelia 2009). In terms of teachers^ roles, the need to explore the full range of Educ Inf Technol DOI 10.1007/s10639-017-9582-5