Social science education under digital conditions: The role of creativity in media practices on social networks

Purpose: This paper explores social media practices with an exemplarily focus on constructions of space and social movements. It aims at identifying prospects for social science education under digital conditions regarding the reconfiguration of content and possibilities for digital literacy. Approach: By reviewing and summarizing popular strands of discussion on the application of social media practices in constructions of spaces and social movements, we identify common didactical themes from an educational perspective. Subsequently, we discuss social networks as real-world learning contexts in light of creative practices. Findings: Building on this, we derive theoretical implications for social science education for teaching and learning within social networks with a special focus on creativity. Following this, we present implications for social science literacy as well as digital literacy, which are two sides of the same coin. Practical implications: Finally, we present implications for future research and outline prospects for a future social science education

No more technology? A TPACK-survey for pre-service teachers with social media in the digital world

In the digital age, social media are integrated into everyday life. To include corresponding topics of the digital world in the classroom, future teachers require specific knowledge and abilities. The extent to which these prerequisites are connected to technology, however, needs to be reevaluated in light of social media's ubiquitous nature. Through adopting the TPACK model for an exemplary topic of the digital world, constructions of space in Geography education, a self-evaluation survey instrument for pre-service teachers is compiled and validated (n = 364); social media are conceptualized as an aspect of technological knowledge. Confirmatory factor analysis confirms that the TPACK model is appropriate for the data, as fit-indices show favorable results. A transformative view of the model is supported. Correlations among all constructs exist, endorsing previous studies’ findings on the difficulties in distinguishing the TPACK knowledge constructs. Technological knowledge, noticeably, displays comparatively low correlations with the other knowledge constructs. This result is contrary to previous studies on TPACK and social media, as well as the relation of TPACK to technological knowledge. Albeit these results are not generalizable for all digital world content in pre-service teacher education, this study, by way of example, contributes to a debate on the conceptualization of technological knowledge when introducing phenomena of the digital world that are related to social media through the TPACK model. Additionally, this study advances research in the area of embedding pre-service teacher education with social media in domain-specific pedagogies