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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 Whether through outdated or uninspiring methods or by functionally disenfranchising students who are not part of the predominant power structure, mainstream civic education maintains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.

Existing research has found that older adults experience technology-related anxiety, resistance, fear, and even technophobia when using digital devices or systems. However, there has been limited conversation in the literature about how scholars define these terms differently, where this anxiety comes from, how current studies or practices deal with such anxiety, and what are possible solutions. To advance this conversation, this article used a scoping review methodology to synthesize themes in the literature on technology resistance among older adults. The scope of the literature review was limited to articles published in peer-reviewed journals. The search keywords included: older adults, seniors, elderly, older people, older population, technology anxiety, resistance to technology, technophobia, digital anxiety, digital resistance, computer anxiety, and resistance to computer. Using PRISMA standards for scoping reviews, 24 articles were selected and analyzed. This review revealed that different terms were used to conceive of and indicate the responses of older adults in showing anxiety, feeling nervous, and hesitating to use technology. A synthesis of studies revealed that research has been done with associated variables such as technology use, perceptions, and intentions, but more research is needed to examine the predictors of discomfort with technology in order to identify effective approaches to resolving technology-related anxiety and hesitancy among older adults. This review contributes to the current understanding of technology anxiety among older adults by illuminating conceptions of the digital divide as it pertains to older populations and suggesting avenues to overcoming it. [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.

Social media are fundamentally changing core practices in various industries. Although surveys indicate that social media are impacting social scientists, we know little about how education scholars, specifically, use social media for their work or professional learning. This article explores how educational scholars incorporated the social media, Twitter, as a conference "backchannel." Using qualitative interview data collected from members of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and considering previous analysis of AERA conference tweet data, we describe participants' purposes and practices and their perceptions of how using this social media impacts participation in the conference community. We discuss implications for those concerned with research dissemination, faculty professional development, and academic identity.

This article defines Twitter[TM]; outlines the features, affordances, and common uses; and conceptualizes "tweeting" as a literacy practice, comprising both traditional and new literacies, and impacting both informal and formal learning settings. Also provided is an overview of traditional and new literacies, and insights from a scan of the research literature to date on tweeting as a literacy practice. The authors outline areas for inquiry and the challenges to conducting such research.

The development of social capital in young people is positively associated with educational attainment, achievement, and psychosocial factors. Prior research has explored factors that contribute to social capital, such as offline social networks. To a lesser extent, studies have analyzed the relationship between online social networks and students' social capital. However, educational researchers have yet to examine this relationship among students from low-income families. It is especially important to consider low-income students since historically they have not reached the same educational attainment and achievement levels as their higher income peers. In this article, we conduct a regression analysis on survey responses from high school students from low-income families (n = 607) to examine the relationship between intensity of online social network site use, social capital, and other measures of psychological well-being. Results suggest positive associations between use of online social network sites and two forms of social capital. Qualitative data were also utilized to illuminate low income students' opportunities or barriers for forging and sustaining relationships through online social network sites and implications for future research and education are discussed. (Contains 7 tables and 1 footnote.)

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.)

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. (Contains 1 figure and 9 notes.)

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.

In the past decade, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Internet and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction and paths for future research. In this article, the authors build on three ideas set forth in comments on their article "Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What Path Should We Take "Now"?" The authors believe that these comments, which extend ideas from their initial article, make important contributions to the vision for transformative scholarship and practice they outlined. Specifically, the authors discuss the professional development of teachers, considerations for building research capacity and social scholarship, and the importance of bridging divides to advance a common research agenda on learning and teaching with Web 2.0.

Since Windschitl first outlined a research agenda for the World Wide Web and classroom research, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Web and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction, and paths for future research. This article discusses the characteristics of Web 2.0 that differentiate it from the Web of the 1990s, describes the contextual conditions in which students use the Web today, and examines how Web 2.0's unique capabilities and youth's proclivities in using it influence learning and teaching. Two important themes, "learner participation and creativity and online identity formation," emerged from this analysis and support a new wave of research questions. A stronger research focus on students' everyday use of Web 2.0 technologies and their learning with Web 2.0 both in and outside of classrooms is needed. Finally, insights on how educational scholarship might be transformed with Web 2.0 in light of these themes are discussed.

Participatory web-based technologies have the potential to change the way scholars engage in scholarship. One reason Web 2.0 technologies, such as online social networking, are not widely integrated in PreK-12 and postsecondary education is the lack of modeling by educators. Their lack of research-based best practices limits the ability to capitalize on learners' engagement with Web 2.0 technologies outside of school to change formal Web 1.0 classroom-based lessons. Such a lack of knowledge prevents both novice and senior scholars from cultivating the "serious online lives" (Lankshear 2007) that would help them discern overly hyped from educative uses of participatory technologies. In this article, the author proposes to examine the concept and application of "social scholarship" and to provide examples for K-12 and postsecondary educators and students who seek to integrate social scholarship into their research practices. As educators and students reflect on and re-envision what they do as scholars--using web-based social networking tools to enact semi-public virtual selves and become intertwined with the work of their peers--their use of these tools may, in turn, provide greater insight into their own scholarly attitudes and practices. Here, the author looks at some of the tools that provide social scholarship opportunities.

The recent editorial in this journal by Bull et al. ("Connecting Informal and Formal Learning Experiences in the Age of Participatory Media" Vol 8, Iss 2) discussed the challenges of bridging formal learning practices and informal learning opportunities within the context of today's Web-enhanced world. In this commentary, Christine Greenhow summarizes key points in the article, addressing what she sees as its central questions. Next, she offers three recommendations for bridging the gap between informal and formal learning and addresses the constraints that Bull et al. identify.

Christine Greenhow, J. D. Walker, Dan Donnelly, and Brad Cohen describe the implementation and evaluation of the University of Minnesota's Fair Use Analysis (FUA) tool, an interactive online application intended to educate users and foster defensible fair use practice in accordance with copyright law by guiding users through a robust, fact-specific, four-factor analysis. After examining the FUA tool's ability to improve both student understanding of the four factors involved in fair use analysis and the quality of student reasoning with those factors, Greenhow, Walker, Donnelly, and Cohen suggest that students still find certain aspects of fair use law particularly difficult to comprehend and offer recommendations for educators and administrators seeking to design or disseminate similar tools to promote informed instructional practices. (Contains 4 exhibits.)

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.)

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. (Keywords: low-income students, Internet use, social network sites, literacy, survey research, digital equity), [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Introduction Increasingly pervasive, networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) via the Internet make possible new learning contexts, pedagogies, and learning outcomes. Technology infrastructure investments in U.S. schools have [...]