Thinking in hashtags: exploring teenagers’ new literacies practices on twitter

This research investigates how three high school students in the USA developed new literacies practices through their participation in teenage Twitter. Data was collected from two sources, including archival data from participants’ Twitter over a two-year span, and semi-structured interviews. Results found that teenagers developed a number of practices that facilitated orientation to cultural conventions of teenage Twitter, helped them mobilize followers for participatory events, and led to reflective awareness of how to tell stories on Twitter. This study suggests that teenagers used the affordances of Twitter in order to craft multimodal narratives that are co-constructed, participatory, nonlinear, and emergent. Thinking in hashtags, for participants, is a kind of action that serves to develop affinities of relation (to friends, to pop culture, and to new knowledge) through mediatized ‘vital life stuff

Toward Critical Social Media Pedagogy: The Intersection of Narrative, Social Media, and the Civic

This paper presents a theoretical meditation connecting the co-constructed, participatory narratives of social media with opportunities for increased participatory and critical civic engagement. We argue that teaching with and through social media uses practices to develop student agency, facilitate raised-consciousness, and encourage action-oriented problem solving by leveraging co-constructed processes and the social. We work toward a critical social media pedagogy by considering the possibilities of social media. These allow for storytelling across dimensions of time and space through co-constructed understandings of reality in order to bend the arc of narrative. Further, we contend that through social media storytelling, we see the development of preconditions for civic engagement engaging in identity formation, affinity building, and participation

Learning with social media: Bringing popular platforms into the classroom to develop literacy, identity, and citizenship

Walk into almost any secondary school today and you’ll see students seemingly glued to their phones. A study from 2018 revealed that almost 50% of youth are online “almost constantly” and they’re often engaging with social media, whether watching videos on YouTube, participating in the latest dance craze on TikTok, checking Facebook, or making videos on Snapchat. Through these sites, young people are creating sophisticated digital stories, finding and sharing relevant information, contributing to current discussions and, in short, developing digital literacy, digital citizenship, language, and other valuable 21st-century skills

The best of all worlds: Combining the flipped classroom, game-based learning, and learning communities in a large technology integration course.

This paper presents the use of a combination of pedagogical strategies in teaching a large undergraduate technology integration course. Course revisions include a motivating game-based learning structure, practitioner-focused design, and the flipped classroom model. Students perceived each course change positively with suggestions for refinement

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

Tools, Processes, Participation: Social Media for Learning, Teaching, and Social Change

Despite attempted pedagogical shifts toward situated learning, social constructivism, and social practice theory, we find pedagogy for social media to remain primarily situated in behaviorist or cognitivist assumptions of learning. Moreover, in an attempt to craft our own participatory pedagogies of social media, we found ourselves returning to metaphors and language rooted in ontological assumptions of objectivism. That is to say, we continually referred to social media as a tool with affordances to be leveraged for learning. In this paper we examine three understandings of social media - as we see them - in literature, pedagogy, and practice. We categorize these understandings through the psychological perspectives of behaviorist, cognitivist, and sociocultural learning theories. In so doing, we imagine new ways of both using social media for teaching and learning as well as possible language to better reflect our own ontological and epistemological assumptions of social media

Addressing the Accessibility of Social Media

Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they offer many different spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are deaf or hard of hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor impairments must find workarounds to deal with the complex user interfaces of these platforms, and users with cognitive disabilities may face barriers to composing and sharing information. Accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities will come together to outline challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. The workshop starts with a panel of end-users with disabilities who will recount their Perspectives of Successes and Barriers. Industry professionals from social media companies (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn) will detail their Design Process and Implementation Challenges in a panel with questions from attendees. The attendees will share their work and tackle Open Challenges and Future Research Directions. This workshop will forge collaborations between researchers and practitioners, and define high-priority accessibility challenges for social media platforms

2006 SQ372: A Likely Long-Period Comet from the Inner Oort Cloud

We report the discovery of a minor planet (2006 SQ372) on an orbit with a perihelion of 24 AU and a semimajor axis of 796 AU. Dynamical simulations show that this is a transient orbit and is unstable on a timescale of 200 Myrs. Falling near the upper semimajor axis range of the scattered disk and the lower semimajor axis range of the Oort Cloud, previous membership in either class is possible. By modeling the production of similar orbits from the Oort Cloud as well as from the scattered disk, we find that the Oort Cloud produces 16 times as many objects on SQ372-like orbits as the scattered disk. Given this result, we believe this to be the most distant long-period comet ever discovered. Furthermore, our simulation results also indicate that 2000 OO67 has had a similar dynamical history. Unaffected by the "Jupiter-Saturn Barrier," these two objects are most likely long-period comets from the inner Oort Cloud