Learning and Collective Knowledge Construction With Social Media: A Process-Oriented Perspective

Abstract

Social media are increasingly being used for educational purposes. The first part of this article briefly reviews literature that reports on educational applications of social media tools. The second part discusses theories that may provide a basis for analyzing the processes that are relevant for individual learning and collective knowledge construction. We argue that a systems-theoretical constructivist approach is appropriate to examine the processes of educational social media use, namely, self-organization, the internalization of information, the externalization of knowledge, and the interplay of externalization and internalization providing the basis of a co-evolution of cognitive and social systems. In the third part we present research findings that illustrate and support this systems-theoretical framework. Concluding, we discuss the implications for educational design and for future research on learning and collective knowledge construction with social media.

Digital Learning Environments in Higher Education: A Literature Review of the Role of Individual vs. Social Settings for Measuring Learning Outcomes

“…We also argue that the particular theoretical perspective that researchers and practitioners take toward learning with digital media may have an impact on how they design learning environments, how they operationalize relevant variables, and how they measure learning outcomes [26]. Research on digital learning environments has traditionally applied two perspectives of examining and understanding how people learn [33]: A cognitive, individual-oriented perspective that focuses on individual cognition, and a social, community-oriented perspective that focuses on distributed cognition and collaboration [34][35][36]. The cognitive perspective has been upheld mainly in psychology and in cognitive science research, while the social perspective has been the dominant approach in the learning sciences for roughly 30 years now [37].The objective of the study presented here was to examine how a cognitive perspective compared to a social perspective determined the dependent variables that researchers have used in existing studies.…”

What Do We Teach When We Teach the Learning Sciences? A Document Analysis of 75 Graduate Programs

“…Emphasizing the social nature of cognition, research on computer-supported collaborative learning has focused on the question of how collaborative learning can be enabled and supported by digital technologies, partially reflecting the roots of the learning sciences in research in computer science and artificial intelligence research (Hoadley & Van Haneghan, 2011). This involves a broad variety of topics such as computer-supported knowledge building in schools (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014), in online communities, and through mass collaboration as, for example, in Wikipedia (e.g., Kimmerle, Moskaliuk, Oeberst, & Cress, 2015). Furthermore, digital technologies are also considered optimal tools to facilitate the implementation of adaptive support for individuals and groups.…”

Human Interaction in the Digital Age: Sociomaterial Practice on Facebook Group in Indonesia

“…Knowing is constitutively entangled with the socio-material practices and the technological affordances. As Kimmerle, Moskaliuk, Oeberst and Cress (2015) said, community as a whole develops and constructs new knowledge while the community members also individually advance and refine their own knowledge. So individual learning and collaborative knowledge construction are interdependent and occur simultaneously.…”