Abstract. As social media tools are increasingly used in e-learning in the workplace, there is also a growing need for case studies to allow us to understand the underlying dynamics in order to develop best practices and to avoid potential pitfalls. Using qualitative approach, we studied a pilot training tailored for a large insurance organization that was conducted largely with chats, blogs, voice conferencing, and discussion forums. Our results show that despite challenges, social media use can produce value to e-learners and thus lend credence to many, so far weakly substantiated claims about their potential. In particular, synchronous tools enabled peer support, experience sharing, and networking. Still, the results also show that interactive learning process does not emerge automatically from adding social tools but needs to be designed and maintained. Based on learner views, we discuss how to improve the overall learning experience and make learning more efficient. Also, we discuss how to improve social media tools to better meet learner needs in e-learning in contrast to their recreational use.
As social media features are increasingly added to e-learning, we urgently need more case studies of their use to ground practices in actual experience rather than hype. Using ethnography-based approach, we studied five continuous pro-fessional development pilot trainings where learning largely took place at workplace through wikis, blogs, forums, chats and voice conferencing. Learners valued interactivity, peer support and abundant, instant feedback offered by synchro-nous features. Simultaneously, however, asynchronous fea-tures were often treated as chores and overall interactive learning culture failed to emerge. Instructors, while explicitly encouraging social learning approach, implicitly reinforced teacher-centered learning, leading learners to stick to conven-tional learning culture. Also, training designs often failed to engender interaction. Moreover, at general level, group sizes were too big, moderation was not used efficiently, and differ-ing skill sets of learners were not evened out. The lessons learned from these trainings offer us insight into how to design e-learning enhanced with social media and how to avoid po-tential pitfalls. Particularly, we discuss designing interactivity into the e-learning process
We studied user behavior in a recommender-rich environment, Amazon online store, to see what role the algorithm-based and user-generated recommendations play in finding items of interest. We used applied ethnography, on-location interviewing and observation, to get an accurate picture of user activity. We were especially interested in the role of customer ratings and reviews and what kind of strategies users had developed for such an environment. Our results underline the need to develop recommender systems as a whole. The way the recommendations are shown affects which items get picked, and for improving the interface, it is necessary to study the whole in addition to studying the parts in isolation.
Recommender systems, long used in e-commerce to help users find salient items, also offer tools for virtual learning communities to let the community determine what items are most pertinent to its members. However, due to differences in numbers and goals, learning environments cannot simply copy e-commerce approaches to recommenders. This article discusses design issues related to using recommenders in learning environments and student perceptions of using rating and commenting to allow students to winnow additional reading materials in a university course website. Positive student perceptions show that recommenders can enhance virtual learning community experience. The rating feature in particular was viewed positively and perceived to influence selecting behaviour, while commenting, although also perceived positively, was seen as underused and less influential. In addition, the design of the system is evaluated in the light of the student feedback and potential improvements are discussed.
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