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Most U.S. teenagers participate in online social network sites, devoting hours to these networks, often at the expense of other leisure-time activities. This article describes young people's activities within one topic-focused niche network, outlining its unique features and the role of young people as content producers within and beyond the space. Links between youth's online contributions and their interest, self-expression, social connections, and civic involvement are discussed.

"Online learning"--learning that involves interactions that are mediated through using digital, typically internet-based, technology--is pervasive, multi-faceted, and evolving, creating opportunities and challenges for educational research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special issue, we advance an interdisciplinary agenda for online learning research at the intersection of educational technology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. In this first article in the issue, we define online learning including its variants, review historical and current contexts, explore its multidimensionality, and assert key issues shaping contemporary online learning. We propose five important lenses: "community," "engagement," "pedagogy," "equity," and "design-based research," through which scholarly communities are creating knowledge that influences research and practice in online learning contexts. These lenses highlight points of conceptual overlap between the online and psychological learning literatures. The special issue is organized around these lenses and includes an article representing each one, complemented by commentaries that offer critical appraisal and synthesis.

Blended learning, which combines online and face-to-face pedagogy, is a fast-growing mode of instruction as universities strive for equitable and alternative pathways to course enrollment, retention, and educational attainment. However, challenges to successfully implementing blended instruction are that "social presence," or students' ability to project their personal characteristics into the learning space, is reduced with potential negative effects on student engagement, persistence, and academic achievement. Instructors are experimenting with robotmediated communication (RMC) to address these challenges. Results from a study of RMC at a large public university suggest that it offers advantages over traditionally used videoconferencing, including affordances for fostering students' embodiment in the classroom, their feelings of belonging and trust, and their ability to contribute ideas in authentic ways.

In spring 2020, K-12 schools adopted remote learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Using activity theory, the authors examine the educational response to this global health crisis in the United States and the United Kingdom. Data are drawn from key news media publications in each country between 1 February and 31 May 2020. The authors critically examine the tensions and contradictions within and between interrelated systems (schooling, educational policy, home learning). They consider how remote digital pedagogy was perceived and enacted by different stakeholders: teachers, parents, policymakers. Tensions arose between digital pedagogy, system rules and teachers' digital skills, leading to different experiences for students. The division of labour shifted; parental responsibility for managing children's learning increased. Digital equity issues prevailed in both countries (technology access, social support), disadvantaging students from low-income families. National educational policy system responses were more coordinated in the UK than in the US.

Purpose: In a public health crisis where social distancing, or physical distancing while in public spaces, is the new normal, social media offer respite from being alone. Recent statistics show spikes in social media usage worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than just easing loneliness, such freely available digital tools offer affordances for education in an emergency. Design/methodology/approach: This paper summarizes insights from literature reviews of over a decade of research and recent case studies on the benefits of teaching with social media in K-12 education. Findings: The authors highlight three affordances of social media for fostering active learning, community building and civic participation and describe how social media can be used in conjunction with conventional learning management systems. Furthermore, the authors argue that the unprecedented health crisis that is faced today requires the participation of responsible citizens of all ages; K-12 public education is on the front lines of preparing informed and active citizens and the integration of social media as part of remote education plans can help. Practical implications: The paper includes instructional guidelines for K-12 teachers and instructional designers in various settings who seek to integrate social media as part of their strategy for teaching students at a distance and facilitating their civic participation. Originality/value: This paper fulfills an identified need for evidence-based and pragmatic approaches to K-12 online teaching and learning using technologies already widely in use (i.e. social media).

Background and Context: The increasingly widespread use of social media to expand one's social connections is a relatively new but important phenomenon that has implications for teaching, learning, and teachers' professional knowledge and development in the 21st century. Educational research in this area is expanding, but further investigation is necessary to better determine how to best support teachers in their professional development, collaboration, and classroom teaching. Prior literature reviews have focused extensively on higher education settings or particular platforms or platform types (e.g., Facebook, microblogging). This article provides needed insights into K-12 settings and encompasses work from a variety of social media types. We describe a systematic review of more than a decade of educational research from various countries to present the state of the field in K-12 teachers' use of social media for teaching and professional learning across various platforms. Research Questions: To define social media's potentially beneficial roles in teaching and learning, we must first take an in-depth look at teachers' current social media practices. Toward this end, we approached our review with the following research question: How are social media perceived and used by K-12 teachers for their teaching or professional learning, and with what impacts on teachers' practices? Research Design: Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) established standards for rigor and quality in systematic literature reviews, this article reviews empirical research to examine how social media are perceived and used by K-12 teachers with what impacts on teachers' practices. Findings: We find that social media features offer several benefits for helping teachers fulfill their goals for classroom teaching, including enhancing student engagement, community connections, and teacher-student interactions, but these affordances come with challenges that must be navigated. The literature also suggests that social media features provide benefits for teachers' professional learning within both formal professional development programs and informal learning networks. Conclusions: Implications of this literature review for future research and the design of educational practices are discussed in the final section. Among our conclusions are calls for more data triangulation between teachers' and students' learning and experiences on social media, more attention to teachers' observational behaviors on social media, and further exploration of how social media facilitates interplay between teachers' formal and informal learning.

This conceptual exploration revisits a key question from earlier work (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014): What is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? "Social scholarship" is a framework that expanded Boyers' (1990) conceptualization of scholarship to consider how social media affect discovery and research, teaching and learning, integration, and application. This paper critically reflects on how social scholarship continues to evolve in light of changing understandings in the field of educational technology and the role social media play in the academy. We provide recent examples of social scholarship such as altmetrics, interdisciplinary projects, crowdsourced educational technology syllabi and reconsideration of the needs of research participants. Moreover, we share concrete examples of how scholars might enact social scholarship, with what benefits and challenges, and surface new concerns regarding openness, equity, access, literacy, privacy and ethical considerations. Our paper concludes with recommendations for preparing scholars to enact social scholarship while mitigating the challenges it poses.

This study compared the abilities of inservice and preservice teachers to demonstrate an understanding of technology integration and to apply such knowledge to instructional decision-making. Using a set of online content-specific multimedia scenarios to resolve complex problems of teaching with technology in a simulated school environment, inservice teachers outperformed preservice teachers on criteria measuring practical and pedagogical content knowledge about technology integration; however, preservice and inservice teachers scored similarly in their ability to make an instructional decision about technology. In addition, both preservice and inservice teachers demonstrated a lack of weighing competing options in the case and a lack of orientation toward reflective and adjustable practices. Overall, inservice teachers demonstrated consideration of a broader range of classroom- and school-level factors in making a technology integration decision. Understanding, capturing, and measuring these differences is essential to advance theory on the dimensions of technological pedagogical content knowledge, and how it develops in different teacher sub-groups to advance the work of teacher educators concerned with designing courses about technology integration appropriate to learners' needs. (Contains 4 tables.)

Online delivery methods offer much promise for anytime, anywhere adult learning. As a method of outreach, and to provide support for just-in-time learning, teacher educators are increasingly deciding to design Web sites that are online, resource-based learning environments for teachers and preservice teachers. Automated evaluation tools and data collection methods can help such Web site designers develop and use online, resource-based learning environments to meet their goals of providing high quality learning opportunities for teachers. This article presents a three-pronged approach for evaluating issues of pedagogical design and user-centered functionality in online, resource-based Web sites. Checklist, Web site traffic analysis, and talk aloud protocols are each described and then illustrated through their application to a site aimed at educating teachers about technology integration. We discuss the relevance for developing effective learning environments when teacher educators apply this evaluation approach to resource-based learning environments. (Contains 1 table and 3 footnotes.)

The increasingly widespread use of social network sites to expand and deepen one's social connections is a relatively new but potentially important phenomenon that has implications for teaching and learning and teacher education in the 21st century. This paper surveys the educational research literature to examine: How such technologies are perceived and used by K-12 learners and teachers with what impacts on pedagogy or students' learning. Selected studies were summarized and categorized according to the four types introduced by Roblyer (2005) as studies most needed to move the educational technology field forward. These include studies that establish the technology's effectiveness at improving student learning; investigate implementation strategies; monitor social impact; and report on common uses to shape the direction of the field. We found the most prevalent type of study conducted related to our focal topic was research on common uses. The least common type of study conducted was research that established the technology's effectiveness at improving student learning. Implications for the design of future research and teacher education initiatives are discussed.

Online social networks are increasingly important information and communication tools for young people and for the environmental movement. Networks may provide the motivation for young adults to increase environmental behaviors by increasing their knowledge of environmental issues and of the specific actions they can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This study examined an application within Facebook.com--the largest online social network in the world--that allowed users to post climate change news stories from other websites and comment on those stories. A survey revealed that users of the social networking application reported above average knowledge of climate change science and that self-reported environmental behaviors increased during young people's involvement with the "Facebook" application. Focus groups indicated that peer role modeling through interaction on the site motivated pro-environmental behaviors, that is, behavior that seeks to minimize the negative impact of one's actions on the natural and built world. Participation in a community of like-minded users spurred many participants to learn more about climate change and do more to limit its impact. (Contains 4 tables.)

All students today are increasingly expected to develop technological fluency, digital citizenship, and other twenty-first century competencies despite wide variability in the quality of learning opportunities schools provide. Social network sites (SNSs) available via the internet may provide promising contexts for learning to supplement school-based experiences. This qualitative study examines how high school students from low-income families in the USA use the SNS, "MySpace," for identity formation and informal learning. The analysis revealed that SNSs used outside of school allowed students to formulate and explore various dimensions of their identity and demonstrate twenty-first century skills; however, students did not perceive a connection between their online activities and learning in classrooms. We discuss how learning with such technologies might be incorporated into the students' overall learning ecology to reduce educational inequities and how current institutionalized approaches might shift to accommodate such change.

Trends in higher education have contributed to the need for more coordination and collaboration among different constituencies involved in instructional design and delivery. As researchers and educational technologists working in a large public research university, our research focuses on understanding the interactions among various stakeholder groups involved in e-Learning courses. In this paper we provide an interpretation of how Activity-Oriented Design Methods (AODM) based on Activity Theory can be used to develop a more comprehensive understanding of collaborative knowledge building practices among course design teams and their students. We also discuss how these methods can inform instructional design and development within distance education programs. In the absence of universally accepted methods for applying activity theoretical perspectives, these methods provide an analytic scheme for identifying the essential elements of an activity and for examining their interrelationships or contradictions, which are essential to improving the activity overall. The procedures described here have been used in a series of e-Learning case studies at our institution. We draw from one case to illustrate our interpretation of Activity-Oriented Design Methods. The themes discussed in this paper have implications for a broad audience of educational researchers, technologists, instructional systems designers, faculty, course assistants, and administrators concerned with examining and advancing collaboration among different groups in developing e-Learning.

Today, information and communication technologies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are some of the most popular technologies available on the Internet, with millions of users worldwide. Research is still trying to discover how people use them, for what purposes, and in what settings, and investigate how they may be shaping the ways they think, work, and communicate. In this article, the author describes two of the trends in using these tools that she and her colleagues see happening, based on their own research. First, social bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, Diigo, and CiteULike, can provide the resources to facilitate a scholarly approach to teaching where teachers concerned with developing research-based best practices can collectively assemble, annotate, recommend, and share scholarly resources, such as books, journal articles, websites, and contacts. Second, social networking tools, such as Facebook, Classroom 2.0, Ning, and Twitter, can be used to garner collective emotional support and recognition for one's creative practices. In their work studying the potential educational benefits and challenges of social network site use among urban teenagers, the author and her colleagues found that such technologies could function as social learning resources and spaces for new literacy practices. (Contains 9 resources.)

Social media play an increasing role in our everyday lives and in education. Teachers and administrators may use social media for professional learning, to find materials for use in the classroom, and as a vehicle for engaging students with each other or with the world at large. As this body of scholarship continues to grow, now is the time to reflect on where the field might go from here to conduct the most impactful scholarship on education and social media. Accordingly, this chapter proposes research directions and approaches that promise to advance this expanding field, grounded in insights from the long history of studying technology in education, including over a decade of research on social media. We summarize insights from reviews of the existing research literature on learning and teaching with social media in education. Next, we apply a typology of the kind of studies needed to advance the field of education and educational technology as a useful lens for assessing prior work, identifying gaps in the knowledge base, and envisioning potential research directions. The chapter argues that new scholarly work is needed into three main areas: (1) research focus, or the subjects or topics of research that are needed; (2) methodological work, or new or underutilized approaches to studying education and social media; and (3) conceptual work, or theorization or framing of studies in education and beyond. We provide specifics in each of these areas in the final section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As new technologies shape and are shaped by human practices, educators and researchers must consider the impact that participating in social media—to access, reflect upon, question, evaluate and disseminate scholarship—is having on their professional development and practices. This paper investigates how members of the educational research community use social media to advance professional learning and scholarship dissemination in online–offline networks. Specifically, we examine whether and how participating in the microblogging service, Twitter, as a conference backchannel, facilitated professional learning and participation in the annual meetings of American educational researchers in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and the nature of that participation. Insights from this paper will benefit educators of varying disciplines and experience levels interested in the changing nature of social media in education, scholarship, and professional learning ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the hybrid doctoral program in Educational Psychology & Educational Technology (EPET) offered at Michigan State University demonstrates the challenges of designing online courses. Topics discussed include features of the program, benefits of online or hybrid doctoral studies and aim of the course to introduce students to educational technology and psychology for the purpose of improving their research skills. Also discussed are the technologies employed by the course.

This paper discusses access and use of information and communication technologies among urban high school students from low-income families, a topic of great interest to teacher educators, educational policymakers, and others concerned with digital literacy instruction. Recent reports from national digital learning initiatives have portrayed today's teens as digital natives-youth who are constantly online, perceive themselves as Internet-savvy, and prefer technology-enhanced learning experiences. However, this portrait may not be true for all learners. This study investigated trends in Internet use among students from low-income families compared to national trends. In the spring of 2007, students from low-income families responded to a survey assessing their access to the Internet, frequency and type of use, and capacity to use the Internet. The researchers also conducted focus groups with students. In this paper, we discuss findings and implications for teachers seeking to understand similar students' Internet access, use, and capacity and suggest implications for digital literacy instruction, technology policy, and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the role of a social network site (SNS) in the lives of 11 high school teenagers from low-income families in the U.S. We conducted interviews, talk-alouds and content analysis of MySpace profiles. Qualitative analysis of these data revealed three themes. First, SNSs facilitated emotional support, helped maintain relationships, and provided a platform for self-presentation. Second, students used their online social network to fulfill essential social learning functions. Third, within their SNS, students engaged in a complex array of communicative and creative endeavors. In several instances, students' use of social network sites demonstrated the new literacy practices currently being discussed within education reform efforts. Based on our findings, we suggest additional directions for related research and educational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter welcomes the reader to the study of social media in education. It begins with a description of the background, ranging from general use of social media in today's society to the importance of social media in education. The study of social media in education will inevitably draw on interdisciplinary concepts and networks of relationships among ideas and people. Furthermore, social media can help researchers and educators cross current boundaries, such as the organizational boundary of the school, and the domains of teachers and leaders. Social media also reveals boundaries that have been reinforced or are emergent with social media, such as intergenerational and cross-cultural boundaries, and standard boundaries of chronology. The contributors themselves come from interdisciplinary backgrounds (all focused on education, but from computer science, technology, sociology, policy, psychology, etc.), and they consider their own agency in shaping the field of study of social media in education. This includes generating theory, raising ethical issues, and providing practical advice. After describing the organization of the yearbook, most importantly, this introduction directs readers to opportunities to engage the field (#cloud2class). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]