Hybrid Learning in Higher Education: The Potential of Teaching and Learning With Robot-Mediated Communication

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 robot-mediated 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 video-conferencing, including affordances for fostering students’ embodiment in the classroom, their feelings of belonging and trust, and their ability to contribute ideas in authentic ways

Educating Social Scholars: Examining Novice Researchers’ Practices with Social Media

Recent articles in the educational research fi eld have called for a stronger research focus on students’ learning with everyday technologies in-and-out-of classrooms and on the changing nature of scholars’ practices in light of technological advancements. We present fi ndings from a mixed methods study of whether and how novice researchers understand and practice social scholarship – a concept currently being debated in various disciplines – which seeks to leverage social media affordances to create expanded sites for research collaboration, peer review, dissemination, and evaluation of research impact. We found that novice researchers focused almost exclusively on social scholarship of discovery and much less on interdisciplinary, teaching, or applied scholarship. Insights from this study will appeal to those interested in examining the theory and design of graduate student learning and faculty development

#SocialMediaEd: Perspectives on Teaching about and with Social Media in Higher Education

Within the field of education and informational technology, technologies like social media — near ubiquitous in the lives of today’s high school and college students — raise interesting questions about learning, teaching, literacy, design and democracy for researchers and educators. In this panel we considered multiple perspectives on teaching with and about social media from researchers at five different institutions. Three panelists: Greenhow, Gleason and Krutka all teach variations of a Social Media in Education course within graduate programs at their respective universities and each presented an overview of their course goals and curriculum. Description of these courses was enriched by commentary from the panel chair and moderator, also social media in education researchers. The session was organized for maximum audience participation to advance conversations about an essential social media in higher education curriculum across institutions and how to implement and evaluate it

Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. 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

Citizen-Scholars: Social Media and the Changing Nature of Scholarship

Research is rarely created for private use; researchers publish their work so that others can read and use it, to advance the collective understanding of a field and impact people’s lives. Yet traditional approaches to scholarship, which emphasize publication in subscription-based rather than open access journals, inhibit not only the dissemination of research but also its usefulness, particularly outside of academia. Across all fields, scholars, educators, and members of the public benefit from scholarship which is easily accessible. Open science and public, social scholarship can break down these barriers to accessibility and utility. In this age which calls for a more informed citizenry, the use of social media to share and promote discussion of research could change not only the nature of scholarly communication but also the nature of scholarship and scholars’ roles. In this conceptual article, we argue that practicing public, social scholarship and increasing the use of social media to promote scholarship are the civic responsibility of citizen-scholars, so that research becomes more widely accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere