Approaches to Designing Social Media-based Learning Spaces

Abstract

Social media tools have been used in educational settings for several years, with good results with regard to student satisfaction, motivation and/or learning gain. In an attempt to exploit this Web 2.0 potential for education, many researchers have started to design social media-based environments for educational use, enhanced with dedicated learning support features. This paper provides a classification and synthesis of the proposed approaches, offering a comparative review of the design solutions. Three main categories are identified, each of which being analyzed and illustrated with representative systems: i) extending general-purpose social media tools with educational support features; ii) building dedicated stand-alone educational social media tools; iii) integrating multiple social media tools in fullyfledged educational platforms. Categories and Subject Descriptors• Information systems~Web applications • Human-centered computing~Collaborative and social computing systems and tools • Applied computing~Interactive learning environments • Applied computing~Collaborative learning Keywords social media in education, special-purpose Web 2.0 tools, social learning environments

PerLCol: A Framework for Personalized e-Learning with Social Collaboration Support

“…This plugin aims to ensure the privacy of the LMS (Moodle). A mashup by aggregation approach [41] has been used to provide a single interface (space/dashboard) which aggregates different social media tool (SM interaction) components. http://journals.uob.edu.bh The interacting process which took place in the first stage needs to be captured from the interaction software.…”

Social Media for Ubiquitous Learning and Adaptive Tutoring [Guest editors' introduction]

“…4 It is therefore not surprising that Web 2.0 tools have been reportedly used for a variety of educational purposes in wide-ranging contexts and disciplines of study, following various pedagogical approaches and instructional scenarios, and in support of different cognitive processes and learning objectives. 5 For example, blogs can be used to maintain a learning diary, document progress of a learning activity, create an e-portfolio, publish ideas and interesting findings, ask for help, or receive feedback from peers. Wikis are useful for co-creating content, producing collaboratively edited material, incrementally accumulating and organizing knowledge, and annotating lecture notes published on the wiki.…”

“…Media sharing services are a valuable tool for searching educational resources as well as for publishing resources created by students (learner-generated content). 5 In an attempt to further exploit this potential for education, many researchers have started to design special-purpose social media tools, enhanced with dedicated learning support features. These features refer to assessment support, learner tracking and monitoring, collaborative learning facilities, and even complex integrated learning environments.…”

“…These features refer to assessment support, learner tracking and monitoring, collaborative learning facilities, and even complex integrated learning environments. 5,6 Furthermore, social media technologies have started to be used in conjunction with mobile learning technologies.…”