Social Media Tools and Platforms in Learning Environments

Social media is a widespread phenomenon focused on connecting, sharing, and collaborating. The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the educational opportunities for applying social media in the classroom and this is achieved through an application of Bloom’s Taxonomy. A brief description of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, B.S. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Susan Fauer Company, Inc., 1956) and a description of its components: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating is given. It is argued that each of Bloom’s components can be highlighted using different social media tools. Finally, a variety of case studies and further ideas demonstrate the effective deployment of social media in the classroom.

The best practices in the education of software developers require substantial interactions between educator and student, and between students in team projects. Because many students are remote, and colocated students often have different work schedules, their educational needs mirror the needs of distributed software developers. These needs include collaboration tools that replicate the benefits of face-to-face meetings, support real-time tasks such as pair programming, and facilitate asynchronous project-focused communication among team members. Software researchers have invented various development tools that integrate collaborative features. Unfortunately, most of the available collaborative tools have specialized capabilities, such as source-code editing, and developers face numerous collaboration and communication challenges in working with each other.

This chapter presents the core idea and novel design and implementation techniques for a collaborative integrated software development environment with social networking features. The tool, named Social Collaborative IDE (SCI), enables developers to interact with each other within a 3D virtual world. The research results include solutions to problems associated with providing distributed awareness and presence information. SCI addresses the communication and collaboration needs in a variety of different phases in a team software development process, unifies the concepts of social networking and collaborative Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and integrates presence information and collaborative development tools into a single environment.

The SCI system provides software development communities with social activity, presence, and awareness information of team members, other teams, active projects, and current debugging and coding sessions. It also assists developers to find appropriate assistance from inside the development environment. This chapter covers the technical issues in the design and implementation of SCI.

Recent years have seen a much greater emphasis on learning to learn, be it in a classroom environment or an organization. This focus imparts lifelong learning capabilities inducing a formative learning experience. Several studies have reflected that individual learning, which has been a core component around which the education system has been institutionalized, does not fully enable learners to learn the process of learning. It has been observed that people learn faster and in much greater depth in groups, making them familiar with the process of learning. Collective learning is a term that is often used to refer to this concept of learning in groups (dyads, teams, organizations, communities, and societies). However, collective learning encounters several challenges in terms of planning, structuring, managing, and evaluating. With the advent of social media technologies including: blogs, wikis, twitter, social networking sites, social news, social bookmarking, media sharing, virtual worlds, and more, encouraging distributed, collaborative, dynamic, ubiquitous, and personalized experience; new paradigms for communication, learning, and education have emerged. In this chapter, the focus is on social media technology as an enabler for collective learning in a teaching/learning environment. It illustrates a model that leverages the integrated use of social media technologies to support collective learning in a university teaching/learning environment. Moreover, the model is generalizable to other environments. The model demonstrates how various challenges encountered in collective learning (planning, structuring, managing, and evaluating) can be addressed with the help of social media technologies. A case study is presented to showcase the model’s applicability, feasibility, utility, and success.

This work is supported in part by grants from the US Office of Naval Research.

This chapter analyses the critical facts related to open course versus classical alternatives for learning and developing creative ideas in a social computing environment. The driving factors, the available tools and the barriers which hinder their utilisation will be discussed. The variables that will have a relevant impact will be analysed within the context of a model that explains this phenomenon. These new learning paradigms will be analysed within the context of learning and their evolution in the last decade.

The omnipresence of the Internet and high bandwidth connections has brought about the development of powerful software packages called learning management systems (LMS). An LMS integrates the administration and facilitation of online activities and the distribution of learning materials. In this chapter, it is argued that the use of LMS is limited to only a few technological features and that so far it has failed to promote meaningful learning environments. Therefore, two empirical studies were conducted to investigate these concerns. The first study reports the development of a practicable taxonomy for LMS features. The second study extends the taxonomy for discussion forums. This chapter concludes with future perspectives on the application and extension of the introduced practicable taxonomy for LMS.

Creativity-fostered learning in higher education enhanced by social media is described. The fostering of creativity in teaching and learning is illustrated by three examples: (a) a European project about experimental online learning in production engineering (PeTEX); (b) a longitudinal study about informal learning supported by online forums in a computer science faculty (InPUD); and (c) a mind mapping scenario supported by a Web 2.0 tool. Aspects and conceptions toward a framework about fostering creativity in higher education regarding Media-enhanced education are illustrated.

The use of digital maps continuously increases, as more than 80% of the data have geospatial references and social technologies are democratising spatial content. As geodata are the lifeblood of tourism, geovisualisation is becoming very important in e-tourism applications. This implies that geodata management needs to be incorporated into tourism curricula and pedagogies in order to assist graduates with career options. However, although research in geovisualisation has examined the impact of geoportals on team-working and cognitive processes, research in education has not examined the role and impact of geocollaborative portals on collaborative e-learning. This chapter addresses this gap by reviewing the related literature and developing a model showing how to exploit geoportals for designing collaborative e-learning. The applicability of the model is shown by analysing the use of a geocollaborative portal for integrating collaborative e-learning in the teaching of a tourism course. Implications and trends for tourism educators and policy makers are discussed.

This chapter is set in the context of a rapidly changing curriculum context in Hong Kong, where a process of educational reform has been working through the school system and is about to reach the universities. The Chinese University of Hong Kong is a traditional, research-intensive university, where there is only a limited uptake of social media in teaching and learning. Eight teachers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, who have used a range of social-media strategies in their teaching, were interviewed about the successes and challenges of their experiences. As a result of these interviews, a tentative implementation strategy is proposed for action by the eLearning Service.

Quantitative methods were employed to explore the effect that group member’s physical identity had on other member’s perceptions of those individuals as leaders during group work in a virtual context. Comparisons were made between perceptions of leadership after a session in which identity was highly anonymous and after a session in which identity was known via avatar photographs. Participants comprised 149 students engaged in a virtual learning environment, designed to develop a variety of leadership capabilities. The results give some indication that age and weight characteristics may affect perceptions of leadership. Overall, the introduction of physically identifying cues after groups had worked together anonymously for a period of time did not affect perceptions of leadership. Implications of these findings relative to availability of identifying cues, impression formation, status-based equalization, and leadership in virtual learning environments are discussed.

Virtual worlds are gaining in popularity day by day, for a variety of uses. This chapter explores the current and potential applications of 3-D virtual learning environments and the barriers to their potential expansion into a mainstream educational tool. A brief history of virtual worlds is given, followed by an examination into current research on their educational applications, a discussion of the research project undertaken here, and a look at the potential developments of virtual worlds in education. The research study involved the observation of four participants who were new to virtual worlds and analyzing their first 10 h of immersion in both Second-Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WOW). The findings revealed that each participant preferred the game play based WOW, that none sought out educational opportunities within SL, and that what they did experience there was mostly negative.

This chapter introduces Webometrics as an emerging discipline focused on the understanding and assessment of the flow of Web based academic information. It describes the principal web-based techniques and tools used to evaluate the performance of higher education websites and to explain how these information networks are created and modelled. The chapter begins with an introduction to Webometrics: its origin and evolution, its theoretical framework and its relationship with other web disciplines. The principal indicators and measures used to quantify the development of several web units (web domains, sites and pages) are described. Emphasis is placed on the properties of social-network measures in order to describe the visibility of a web site and to characterise the structure of a web space. Major developments, such as the Ranking of World universities on the Web and visualisations of web regions, are considered. Finally, there is a discussion about the implications of this discipline on the improvement of web performance and visibility of the university institutions on the Web and its impact on the development of the higher education web-based policies according to open access and e-learning initiatives.

Webometrics: a discipline devoted to the quantification of the performance of the Web

New online social tools provide more opportunities for social interaction between learners and instructors and among learners. The extent that a computer-supported communication environment supports online social interaction is referred to as the sociability of the environment. In this chapter, an integrated and user-centered approach to understand sociability of social media is presented. Based upon a wide review of literature, a framework of sociability is developed with five major components: purpose and benefit, people, social climate, mediated communication, and technological system. Then significant factors that affect the sociability of social media are identified based upon three empirical studies. The relationship between these factors and the user attitudes and behavior intentions are examined. The influence of culture on sociability is examined and an empirical comparison between German and Chinese internet users with regards to perceived importance of sociability items is presented. Finally, implications for design and use of social media for learning are discussed.

The increasing availability of digital learning resources on the Web is changing the nature of information retrieval (IR) in education. Educators and learners are often faced with two challenges in selecting appropriate online learning resources: the sheer number of learning resources and the variety of educational quality among them. This chapter provides an examination of the current approaches employed to improve the quality of learning resources, which include the current state of the field and typical evaluation approaches adopted in major learning resource repositories. The impact of Web 2.0 and social bookmarking on learning resource evaluation is also considered. A recommender system that uses an ontology-mapping approach is examined and consideration given as to how it can facilitate learning resource evaluation across diverse communities of practice and cultures.

The new e-Learning 2.0 approach combines the use of social software, complementary tools, and mobile Web services to support the creation of ad hoc learning communities. The ubiquitous availability of mobile communication devices which are connected to the Internet makes it possible to use small amounts of spare time for mobile learning. The limited screen size and resolution makes current mobile devices quite hard to visualize multifaceted Web pages, so this kind of content could be adjusted to meet the device needs. This means the contextualization of learning contents for m-Learning usage. A Web services-based framework is presented for adapting, displaying, and manipulating learning objects on small handheld devices. A speech solution allows learners to turn any written text into natural speech files, using standard voices.

Mobile learning enables learning content to be displayed anytime, anywhere, and with any kind of presentation device. Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs) usually provide convenient authoring tools to help instructors construct learning content, which may include static documents such as PowerPoint, Word, PDFs, etc. Dynamic multimedia documents such as video and audio files can also be managed and created. Static and dynamic files can be integrated to enable users to access rich content. Most LCMSs are designed around desktop computer environments, rather than on mobile-device-driven environments. Context-Sensitivity is an application of software system’s ability to sense and analyze context from various sources. Context-Sensitivity enables actions to be taken based on the current context. The action could involve adapting to the new environment, notifying the user, communicating with other another device to exchange information, a change of content, or performing other tasks. Context-Sensitive environments should provide the facilities for application software to define such context-triggered actions so as to transparently invoke them whenever the corresponding contexts are valid. This chapter illustrates how a Context-Sensitive Middleware (CSM) for an LCMS is able to transform the same learning content to different mobile devices, so mobile learning can be supported.

The chapter proposes an optimization of the opportunities for learning via social media through the progression of the social dimension toward collaboration. The key question is how to map this progression when using 2.0 environments for achieving meaningful processes of collaborative construction of knowledge. A pedagogical framework with three mediating elements is developed: social interaction (technology promoted) and participation or collaboration (educationally aimed). The main changes in the participatory scenario and the new forms of participation that are relevant for learning are explored. Subsequently, there is a description of the social dimension with the main variables involved. Finally, once the variables have become visible, some light is shed on pedagogical guidelines concerning how the facilitator has to manage the variables explored in order to promote effective processes of collaboration in the construction of knowledge via contemporary social media.

Web-based bookmarking systems offer users the option to post and tag Web resources privately or to make their tagged resources publicly available to other users of the site. While these systems can exist solely as private tools to organize personal bookmarks, when users share their bookmarks with others, an online social structure emerges. Given the voluntary nature of public contributions in social bookmarking systems, three empirical studies were designed to understand why users contribute to the public repository of tagged bookmarks when it is not mandatory to do so. This is an integrated report of the results of these three empirical studies. Overall, it was found that while some people use bookmarking systems for their own private benefit, most users intentionally contribute resources for other users when they believe that those resources will be potentially useful for others. Taken together, the results suggest that the collective action model underlying social bookmarking systems is characterized by voluntary contributions of high-quality resources (self-regulated voluntarism).

This chapter presents the effect of social presence in learning with social media. It is divided into four parts: introduction, theoretical background, effect of social presence in learning, and conclusion. The introductory section provides the historical background to computer-mediated communication (CMC) research in educational technology with special attention to the concept of social presence. The second section reviews previous research on social presence from the viewpoints of social psychology and educational technology. The third section presents the effects of social presence within social media as described in previous research, particularly Yamada (Comput Educ 52(4):820–833, 2009). Social presence appears to have an effect on motivation and other aspects of the affective side of learning. Avenues for future research are considered.

This chapter provides a case study in the development of a data mining approach to assess blogging and microblogging (‘tweets’) in a higher education setting. Data mining is the use of computational algorithms to analyse large datasets, and this chapter describes the use of the Leximancer software tool to perform a conceptual analysis of the blogs and tweets published by students in an undergraduate course about social media. A Leximancer analysis is represented visually as a ‘concept map’ showing the relationships between the concepts and ideas drawn out of the data automatically, rather than using predefined terms and keywords. In this chapter, Leximancer is used to produce a concept map of the student blogs and tweets to enhance the evaluation of conceptual understanding of the syllabus, as well as more general observations about the use of these social media tools in higher education. This suggests a possible approach to analysing the potentially large volume of text-based information that can be produced by students in these social computing settings.

The amount of social media data dealing with medical and health issues increased significantly in the last couple of years. Patients, physicians, and other health professionals are willing to share their knowledge and experiences in the Web. Medical social media data now provides a new source of information within a learning context, for various learners. The variety of such content provides opportunities for a broad range of applications to exploit this data and support these learners in gaining knowledge. A potential benefit is that communication barriers are much lower for social media tools than communication through traditional channels. The objective of this chapter is to highlight the potentials for learning from medical social media data. Various characteristics of learning from this data will be presented and their impact to groups of learners is highlighted. Further, potential real-world applications are described. Taking this as a basis, the challenges for technology development in this context will be discussed.

The Sampling the Sea Project is a pilot online resource for teachers and students in grades 9–12, designed to improve learning beyond traditionally targeted cognitive dimensions such as knowledge, to include affective dimensions of learning such as attitudes, skills, intention, and efficacy, outcomes of sea food sustainability science, by means of specially designed curricula and active social media participation, with a multisource evaluation component. The chapter provides overviews of the need for ocean sustainability curricula, the Sampling the Sea Project, pedagogic foundations, the ocean science sustainability curriculum, the infrastructure/platform, the justification for and nature of social media activities within the curriculum, the evaluation approach, and summary results.

Digital educational resources have gained attention as the means for supporting educational activities in the context of Technology Enhanced Learning. A number of international initiatives have recently emerged and recognized the importance of sharing and reusing digital educational resources among educational communities worldwide. As a result, organizing, managing, offering, and accessing these resources over the Web have been key issues for both the research and the educational community. Within this framework, a popular way for describing digital educational resources is by using a formal and centrally agreed classification system, such as the IEEE Learning Objects Metadata (LOM). The emerging Web 2.0 applications have increased the amount of user-generated educational resources on the Web. As a result, the issue of socially tagging these resources, beyond predefined metadata schemas, has attracted both research and practical attention. In this book chapter, we discuss issues related to Social Tagging as a means for describing digital educational resources and we present the ASK Learning Objects Social Tagging 2.0 (ASK-LOST 2.0), a Web-based tool that can be used for social tagging digital educational resources in learning environments.

In the proposed chapter, we will start off by introducing social media and some of the features of social networking sites. We will go on to highlight why these technologies are so pervasive, and how/why people are using them. We will expand our discussion to include studies that have examined Facebook as a social networking and learning tool. Specifically, we will go on to present studies that relate to the integration of technology and social media as a means for encouraging learning across the life span, and will use social learning as a theoretical base. We will also present how social media such as Facebook can enrich learning, and offer some suggestions and insights into the policies that may help to balance security, privacy, and risk issues associated with using social media in education. Next, we will present information about risks associated with using social media, and will continue by highlighting how users can protect their information online. We will then present some potential privacy and policy considerations within the educational context that examine social learning contexts, and the implications that these contexts have for the learner and educator. Lastly, we will conclude by offering some suggestions about how to best integrate this technology within the classroom.

Traditional approaches to educating university students, where the instructor “transmits” content from the front of the class to students, are still popular at universities in Australia. It is clear that these approaches are increasingly failing to engage a digitally connected generation of social learners. Traditional lectures provide students with little opportunity to explore lecture content, collaborate with peers, or interact with the instructor. Monash University has been developing a collaborative learning environment that encourages students to participate in a personal learning journey independent of their physical location. This is enhanced by flexible learning spaces designed to facilitate a peer-based educational approach. Initial results indicate that these educational innovations are transforming the pedagogy, space, and technology of education to better meet the needs of twenty-first century learners.