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ABSTRACTWhile Holocaust museums have embraced social media to connect with online audiences and provide educational materials, the specifics of their use are not well understood. A Delphi study involving 22 experts developed a framework for examining Holocaust-related social media content. This framework, the result of a three-round iterative process, includes three main areas: Historical content of the Holocaust, Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust, and Museum activities and communication. The hierarchical system of categories can help users explore the vast range of online materials and help educators identify effective strategies for using social media content in Holocaust education.

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic and disruption of campus-based education, the use of mobile social networking applications to supplement formal education has attracted a great deal of attention. Teachers do have opportunities to join students’ online groups to share, clarify, and exchange housekeeping information and course-related content with them. Teachers can, in particular, provide English as a foreign language (EFL) students with more sources of linguistic input, interaction, and feedback. Research investigating this potential, however, is still scarce in such contexts. The current study explores the likely affordances of teaching presence in students’ WhatsApp groups for designing, facilitating, and guiding cognitive and social processes conducive to their language learning. A mixed-method design was employed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data and information from English-major undergraduates (N= 111) and faculty teachers (N= 8) who joined the same WhatsApp groups for one academic semester at a major university in Oman. Descriptive and thematic analyses of data from a survey with both closed-ended and open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews indicate that the shared WhatsApp groups functioned as small close-knit communities where students were able to constantly access teachers for their assistance, feedback, and clarification of content. Despite these merits, however, the participating faculty believed that the presence of teachers in WhatsApp groups might have consequences for students’ tolerance of ambiguity, scaffolding, and autonomous language learning. The paper concludes by discussing several pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

Educators increasingly teach with social media in varied ways, but they may do so without considering the ways in which social media corporations profit from their uses or compromise transparency, equity, health, safety, and democracy through the design of platforms. There is a lack of scholarship that addresses the curricular topics that educators might investigate to teach about social media platforms and the potential challenges they pose for education and society. In this article, we draw on sociotechnical theories that conceive of social media as microsystems to understand the relationship between users, education, and social media companies. We identify and describe five topics concerning social media design that educators can consider and investigate with students in a variety of settings: user agreements and use of data; algorithms of oppression, echo, and extremism; distraction, user choice, and access for nonusers; harassment and cyberbullying; and gatekeeping for accurate information. In each case, we suggest curricular possibilities for teaching about social media platforms that draw from intersections of curriculum, media, and educational studies.

Social media has attracted considerable scholarly interest. Previous research has demonstrated the need for a more comprehensive overview of social media research across diverse disciplines. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the scope of social media integration across educational settings and how it relates to research in other academic disciplines. Harnessing the search terms of previous literature reviews, this study collected data on 80,267 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection database using search terms that were based on previous literature reviews. The data were analyzed using a combination of co-citation and bibliometric analyses via a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerned with social media, both as a transversal topic and within the educational sector. We are also able to show a range of topical domains in which the vast majority of research on social media is conducted. Our findings have practical implications for scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars can benefit from these types of analyses to identify authors and topic clusters that might otherwise have been unrecognized. Similarly, practitioners can benefit from this overview of the current “state-of-the-art” on social media.

This paper describes the process of boosting an innovative e-learning system in an online university in Italy. The system relies on a satellite-terrestrial telecommunication infrastructure and allows for different interaction types, including synchronous, asynchronous, textual, audio and video communication modes. The adoption of this infrastructure was preceded by a training initiative proposed to the university staff to favor its intake. The paper analyses the effects of both the training initiative and the technological innovation based on qualitative data derived from the observed differences between the pre-existing courses and their re-design and quantitative data tracked by the system during a pilot test that lasted eleven months. These data show a trend reversal in the e-learning approach, from a prevalence of transmissive mode to a more interactive one, although there is still a long way to go before more radical changes can take place.

This paper draws on the authors' experience in using SoftArc Intranet FirstClass TM as a collaborative learning environment and discusses and exemplifies the pros and cons of choosing this system for running online courses. After a short description of FirstClass and its educational uses, the paper focuses on some case studies: two courses developed and run by the Institute for Educational Technology of the Italian Research Council. These are used as a basis for qualitative considerations about the strengths and weaknesses of FirstClass, including occasional comparisons with the performance of similar systems. In the exposition, a distinction is made between the viewpoints of the course student, the course tutor and designer, and the course administrator. The main conclusion is that FirstClass lends itself very well to managing collaborative learning processes at a distance, providing a very simple and easy to understand interface which can be configured by the course designers according to different design principles. As far as the system's weaknesses are concerned, we must mention that it does not offer sufficient support for the web design tasks that course tutors, designers and students sometimes have to carry out. Moreover, it lacks ad hoc functions for the analysis of communication flows, which are very useful for formative evaluation purposes.

The article offers information on a "British Journal of Educational Technology" special issue to be published in May 2017 which seeks students' inputs on improving education through digital technologies, and issues a call for papers on the matter, giving dates for submission, as of December 2015.