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Since the coronavirus pandemic, the ability to reach others across virtual space has become a prominent, widespread phenomenon. Within social media, social and professional discourse extends across fields. Social media, considered by many as the Fifth Estate, redefines network influence and provides an outlet for historically underrepresented voices. Particularly in education, how educators relate within virtual space is a window into their thinking and often behavior online and offline. This issue will investigate the various forms of educators' engagement within social media and its influence within elementary schools and classrooms. A confluence of Wall Street, Main Street, and community school, the Fifth Estate is at its core composed of humans interested in sharing their ideas, advice, and stories—building trust. This work presents computational social science applications across K-20 education, computer science, mathematics education, social network analysis, research on early elementary engagement within social media, and social media in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students today spend more time writing on social media than they do in formal classrooms and have developed distinct and complex literacies separate from traditional writing curricula. Although several studies have explored teens' informal literacy practices online, research investigating how these spaces may inform or be effectively utilized in the classroom remains inconclusive. This systematic literature review identifies and critically evaluates the existing knowledge base on how social media have been integrated in high school writing instruction, with particular emphasis on which factors improved student learning and which factors created barriers to student learning. Social media platforms were found to be potentially authentic learning spaces, yet sometimes low student participation hindered effective implementation. Specific teaching strategies, such as modeling and scaffolding instruction, and directions for future research are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that social media has the potential to bridge formal and informal learning through participatory digital cultures. Exemplars of sophisticated use by young people support this claim, although the majority of young people adopt the role of consumers rather than full participants. Scholars have suggested the potential of social media for integrating formal and informal learning, yet this work is commonly under-theorized. We propose a model theorizing social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Through two contrasting case studies, we apply our model together with social constructivism and connectivism as theoretical lenses through which to tease out the complexities of learning in various settings. We conclude that our model could reveal new understandings of social media in education, and outline future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traditional civic education in the U.S. often does not meet the needs of students. Whether through outdated or uninspiring methods or by functionally disenfranchising students who are not part of the predominant power structure, mainstream civic education maintains hegemonic structures and, in turn, systems of oppression. Scholars have argued that reconceptualizing citizenship is an important component to addressing these shortcomings. Further, an increased use of social media as a tool for new forms of civic participation has been observed, but little research has been done to examine how teachers are using these platforms in their teaching of civics. This study explored high school social studies teachers' conceptualizations of citizenship and their use of the social media platform, Twitter, with their students for civic education. Findings showed that teachers' conceptions of citizenship were influenced by their local context: teachers observed geographic or racial barriers for their students' civic participation, which informed how they understood and taught about civic participation. Teachers' use of Twitter was intended to provide ways for students to disrupt the systems that established these barriers; however, teachers' practice of using Twitter did not always align with their intentions. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]