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The use of social media in higher education has been demonstrated in a number of studies to be an attractive and contemporary method of teaching and learning. However, further research and investigation are required in order to align social media's pedagogical benefits with the theoretical perspectives that inform educational practices. It is the objective of this study to provide a systematic literature review using bibliometric analysis techniques and content analysis to provide a map of research produced between 2009 and 2021. This study aims to identify theoretical frameworks, current research trends, and patterns in this field. A total of 772 publications were analysed using bibliometric methodology, while a subset of 55 publications were analysed using content analysis. As indicated by the results, there is still a growing interest in this area of research, with recent studies still focusing on attitudes towards the use of social media in teaching and learning. According to the content analysis, technology acceptance theories and learning theories are the most commonly used reference theories. This field has yet to elaborate on pedagogical theory, and there is a tendency to rely primarily on technology acceptance models rather than pedagogical models. A discussion of future practice and research implications is also provided.

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.

Research on scholars' use of social media suggests that these sites are increasingly being used to enhance scholarly communication by strengthening relationships, facilitating collaboration among peers, publishing and sharing research products, and discussing research topics in open and public formats. However, very few studies have investigated perceptions and attitudes towards social media use for scholarly communication of large cohorts of scholars at national level. This study investigates the reasons for using social media sites for scholarly communication among a large sample of Italian university scholars (N = 6139) with the aim of analysing what factors mainly affect these attitudes. The motivations for using social media were analysed in connection with frequency of use and factors like gender, age, years of teaching, academic title, and disciplinary field. The results point out that for the most used tools the influence of the variables examined was higher in shaping scholars' motivations. In fact, frequency of use, age, years of teaching, and disciplinary field were found to be relevant factors especially for LinkedIn and ResearchGate-Academia.edu, while gender and academic title seemed to have a limited impact on scholars' motivations for all social media sites considered in the study. Considerations for future research are provided along with limitations of the study.

This conceptual paper deals with some of the implications that the use of social network sites, though not originally developed and conceived for learning purposes, have for schools and academic activities when they are used as tools able to modify and innovate teaching/learning practices and academic culture. Beside the differences that characterize the two contexts, the attention that social network tools are progressively gaining in schools and higher education practices and pedagogies requires adjustments in learning and teaching that should be constantly considered by educators and policy makers. These environments are also presenting new and crucial opportunities for teacher training and teachers' professional development. The purpose of the study is to reflect on some significant challenges and opportunities offered by social network sites, and how to exploit the latter, in relation to a number of themes. These themes have been identified as those that deserve better comprehension and further research investigation: communication between students and teachers and appropriate professional behaviours; pedagogical and technological challenges related to incorporating social networking practices into teaching and academic practices; how social networking can be exploited for teachers' professional training and development. The study also provides some implications for policy and practice.

An editorial is presented on the movement to give students and student teachers a voice in their education. Topics include the use of educational technologies and online social networks in student teaching and learning. The author presents the view that technology-enhanced learning environments help to increase student participation and engagement in the learning process and in their communities.

Despite their growing popularity, there are many contradictory arguments between supporters and detractors of MOOCs. Nevertheless, the advent of mass-scale online courses is increasingly credited to have the potential to reshape higher education significantly over time, and recent research analyses how and in which ways such a potential can be leveraged. Aim of this conceptual study is to incorporate the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework into learning design practice to overcome current MOOCs pedagogical limitations. In order to be applied to a large number of participants, the three presences of the CoI framework (social, cognitive and metacognitive, and teaching) need to be adjusted and combined with the distributed learning approach. In this way, fostering distributed learning among participants would lead learners to take responsibility for their learning experience through the exploitation of roles and tasks traditionally assigned to distinct and separate roles. These adjustments could address issues of participation, motivation, and enhance successful learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Media tools are seen by many authors as powerful drivers of change for teaching and learning practices, in terms of openness, interactivity and sociability. However, extensive surveys about actual use that are carried out with large samples at a national level are rare. This study reports the results of a survey addressed to the Italian academic staff, with the aim of identifying the uses of Social Media in the field of university teaching practices. The response rate was 10.5%, corresponding to 6139. The respondents were asked to identify frequency of use, motivations, teaching practices and obstacles related to the use of a number of tools: generic social network sites (Twitter, Facebook), professional and academic networking services (LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Academia.edu ), tools to write and comment (blogs, wikis) and to archive and retrieve content material for lectures and group work (podcasts, YouTube and Vimeo, SlideShare). Analyses of data tested which socio-demographic variables mostly affected frequency of use, and the relationships between motivations, ways of use, barriers to use and the scientific discipline. The results show that Social Media use is still rather limited and restricted and that academics are not much inclined to integrate these devices into their practices for several reasons, such as cultural resistance, pedagogical issues or institutional constraints. However, there are differences among academics in the ways they use Social Media or perceive them, mostly depending on the scientific discipline of teaching. Overall, the results emphasise ambivalent attitudes towards the benefits and challenges of Social Media in the context of higher education with obstacles prevailing over advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at providing empirical evidence on how higher education scholars are using Social Media for personal, teaching and professional purposes. A survey tool was addressed to the entire Italian academic staff, with a response rate of 10.5% corresponding to 6139 responses. The study takes into account a number of socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, numbers of years of teaching, academic title, and academic discipline. It also explores the relationship between the different kinds of use, the relationship between frequency of use of Social Media and online and/or blended teaching, as well as the use of institutional e-learning systems. The results show that Social Media use is still rather limited and restricted and that the variable most associated with frequency of use is scientific discipline. In addition, age and seniority seem to influence the adoption of Social Media. The results also revealed that frequency of personal use is mostly associated with the frequency of professional use more than with the frequency of teaching use. They also show that prior experience with e-learning or blended learning is greatly associated with Social Media use. Overall, the study emphasises a generally more favourable attitude towards personal sharing and connecting with peers in professional networks rather than integrating these devices into their teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As explained here, data practices and the relative techno-structure (the choices made about digital platforms and the way data is extracted) are embedded into HE institutional culture, taking the form of a data culture. In this line, scholars have not yet resolved the ethical issue of whether public tweets are by default public data (Kitchin [46]), and they caution against considering social media posts publicly available where user expectations of privacy are lacking (Franzke et al. [28]), In general, teachers and scholars need to be aware that "just because social media data are public, does not mean people do not have context-specific and data-specific expectations of privacy" (Gruzd et al. [38], p. 1). In the same vein, the idea of data literacy is developed through the literature review and the goal-oriented analysis built on the conviction that becoming familiar with current data practices and their techno-structure will enable participants to engage fairly within the HE data culture. Exploring data and their purposes, properties and quality; understanding how data is generated; understanding how data can be extracted; using multiple (quan-qual) measures/sources of data; understanding how to analyse, manage and aggregate data, enacting a collaborative use of data within the professional activity. [Extracted from the article]