British Journal of Educational Technology doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01365.x
Vol 43 No 5 2012
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Editorial: Social Networking and Mobile Learning In the era of the “connected and mobile society” (Rheingold, 2002), learners and teachers, as well as workers, especially in developed countries, are more and more involved in complex webs of relationships and networks with others exchanging information and sharing knowledge. This networking has taken place through web-based applications fostering online collaboration for some time now. Open and closed social networks and social networking sites (SNSs; Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Merchant, 2012) are rapidly becoming the places where learners and workers intertwine the formal and informal dimension of learning and collaboration, mainly from the perspective of smoothing over the boundaries between them. In these environments, the interplay between online and offline interaction is reflected by our “liquid” identity (Bauman, 2004) as progressively shaped by the digital habitats (Wenger, White & Smith, 2009) we live in and by the different patterns of relationships we are involved with. In actual scenarios, the role played by high-end mobile devices as a means through which to access and connect to SNSs is increasing. Today much of social networking is taking place with and on smartphones. Despite a growing interest in a socio-cultural perspective on mobile learning (see, eg, Pachler, Bachmair & Cook, 2010), a great deal of work is still characterized by techno-centric discourse largely underpinned by a deterministic understanding of the relationship between society and technology. This has arguably led to an underestimation of the potential for, and importance of, agency and cultural practices of the user, as well as the content and context generation to support community-building processes through the integration with other socio-technical mechanisms such as social networks. At the same time, the analysis of sociotechnical mechanisms that support the content and context generation process requires a better understanding of the affordances and potential of social and mobile technologies. This special issue aims at exploring educational and socio-cultural perspectives on the use of the increasing convergence of mobile devices and digital media for social networking in formal and informal contexts of learning. It originated from the work of the Theme Team SoMobNet (Social Mobile Networking for Informal Learning; http://www.somobnet.eu/), a capacity-building network part-funded by STELLAR, the Network of Excellence on technology-enhanced learning funded by the European Union within the Framework Program 7 (FP7), in particular the international roundtable held at the Institute of Education in London on November 2011. The papers selected for this issue come from scholars in the social, learning and behavioural sciences and cover different research topics ranging from social and mobile networking in workbased education to learning through a mobile-networked environment in K-12 education. In addition, they reflect diverse ways of exploring this new phenomenon. To illuminate this emerging field, both reflection papers and empirical research were encouraged to identify the new challenges that social mobile media are presenting to our educational systems today. Moreover, the empirically orientated papers are characterised by the use of different research methods and designs, including qualitative description and case studies as well as quantitative analysis or mixed research strategies. To a certain extent, this methodological pluralism is linked to the complexity of the research focus under investigation. This is always true for the understanding of social and educational events, even more so, when facing new phenomena such as that of social mobile networking in education. In an attempt to organize the diverse themes the papers are organised in three main sections. The first section contains a series of four papers that revolve around social (mobile) network(ing), © 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2012 BERA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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work-based learning and professional development in informal (or mixed) settings. John Cook and Norbert Pachler’s paper “Online people tagging: social (mobile) network(ing) services and work-based learning” portrays a conceptual framework to investigate the use of social networks for learning in informal and professional contexts and explores some of the affordances of social media for work-located learning. The original contribution of the paper lies in the formulation of an initial typology of informal workplace learning aimed at providing a frame to understand social (mobile) network(ing) services in work-based learning with particular attention to people tagging. This typology was derived after a wide critical review of key issues from the literature on work-based learning, face-to-face and technology supported, and taking into account the features of social (mobile) networking services. In order to illustrate the several aspects of this typology the authors present a case study of people tagging tool use in digital social networks, taken from the European Commission-funded MATURE project. Another case study is reported in Christoph Pimmer, Sebastian Linxen and Urs Gröhbiel’s paper “Facebook as a learning tool? A case study on the appropriation of social network sites from mobile phones in developing countries.” The focus here is on students and professionals’ use of social network sites, especially Facebook, for learning in the informal context of virtual professional communities in the setting of developing and emerging countries. To date, there have been several studies on Facebook-related issues such as privacy concerns, identity formation, friendship articulation, as well as a number of research studies on the educational use of Facebook in the formal context of higher education. Much less studied is the possible learning value of SNSs such as Facebook as an interface between formal and informal contexts for learning, particularly in the field of professional development. The authors tackle this issue through a qualitative study involving medical students and faculty in a developing country and analysing a Facebook site centred on medical and clinical topics. Unlike previous studies, the analysis identifies explicit types of educational content (eg, quizzes, case presentations) embedded in the informal learning context of Facebook and shows how people in virtual professional communities negotiate their professional identities. While keeping the interest in education and Facebook, Maria Ranieri, Stefania Manca and Antonio Fini’s paper “Why (and how) do teachers engage in social networks’ groups? An exploratory study on professional use of Facebook and its implications for lifelong learning” narrows the focus on the professional use of Facebook by groups of (Italian) teachers and analyses it through the lens of Social Capital Theory. In a similar vein to Pimmer and colleagues’ work, this paper provides a conceptual framework as well as a wide collection of data for advancing the knowledge in the still unexplored field of professional use of Facebook. The leading research questions of the paper concern the mechanisms of group membership and their participatory dynamics, in terms of group types, duration of membership, and the interplay between offline and online activities. These questions are investigated in the light of Social Capital Theory and the Internet studies, in combination with the notions of “domain, network and practice” borrowed from the Networks of Practice framework. Results show that groups dealing with diverse domains (generic or thematic) are characterised by different mechanisms of affiliation and participation, and that mechanisms of legitimation of the members, as well as of shared resources, are associated with the duration of membership. The authors conclude by underlining the need to investigate how social capital dynamics evolve over time, influencing the construction of group identity. One further paper, “Questioning the character and significance of convergence between social network and professional practices in teacher education” by Keith Turvey, focuses on teachers’ professional development and social networking. Moving from a techno- to a teacher-centred perspective, the author examines the interplay between teachers’ narratives of social network practice and their emergent professional practice with technologies with the aim of capturing © 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2012 BERA.
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and conceptualising their perceptions of the experience. The theoretical framework for the analysis of how teachers appropriate the technological tools in their pedagogical practice plays on the notion of user-agency as conceptualised in the cultural ecology theory of appropriation. Through the use of a narrative methodology, the study reveals that teachers’ dispositions towards the appropriation of technologies are as ubiquitous across social networks and professional contexts as the technological tools themselves. It also confirms the fertility of an agent-centred view of convergence embedded within the wider socio-cultural ecology that incorporates individuals’ engagement with media and social networks practices. These four opening papers paint a picture that suggests although research on professional uses of social mobile networking for learning is still relatively scant and fragmented, the rising phenomenon of convergence between social media and mobile devices is generating new affordances for learning, particularly in informal contexts. Indeed, the practice of people tagging as well as the engagement with SNSs’ groups have proven to be fruitful in capitalizing and sharing knowledge, and indicate the emergence of a new research area that certainly deserves the attention of the research community on technology enhanced learning. The second section includes two papers on learning through a mobile-networked environment at the interface of formal and informal contexts in K-12 education. Guy Merchant’s paper “Mobile practices in everyday life: popular digital technologies and schooling re-visited” provides a conceptual framework to reflect on the role of social mobile media within schools. As an increasing number of teenagers are intensely using mobile devices in their daily lives, the place of these technologies in formal education has become a controversial issue in the current public debates. A dominant view is that there is no room for mobiles in the school. As an alternative to such a view, the author argues for a more nuanced perspective on mobile technologies and suggests focusing on everyday social practices as a way of understanding the relationship between mobile devices and learning. Practice theory is used as a starting point to map everyday mobile practices onto educational activity and to identify potential areas for innovation and evaluation. Rather than rehearsing familiar arguments about the relationship between digital technology and schooling, the author calls for a more principled consideration of how educational institutions relate to changes occurring in the ways we access, share and build knowledge today. Also the second paper in this section, “Museum learning via social and mobile technologies: (how) can online interactions enhance the visitor experience?” by Koula Charitonos, Canan Blake, Eileen Scanlon and Ann Jones, deals with social mobile media and K-12 education, but with a more empirical flavour. Framed within a socio-cultural perspective on learning as meaning-making, the paper investigates the use of social and mobile technologies in school field trips as a means of enhancing the visitor experience. The Museum of London was selected as the site of the study, and a group of students from secondary school were involved in publishing online posts on Twitter and completing a series of activities on-site. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data gathered from Twitter and direct observation, the authors provide an explanation of the role of social and mobile tools in fostering the social interactions around museum artefacts and ultimately the process of shared construction of meaning-making. The special issue concludes with a third section comprising two papers that provide a synthesis of primary research studies around social networks, particularly Twitter, in education and mobile learning with the aim of identifying current challenges and some recommendations. Fei Gao, Tian Luo and Ke Zhang’s paper “Tweeting for learning: a critical analysis of research on microblogging in education published in 2008–2011” offers a systematic analysis of the current body of studies on micro-blogging in education, including peer-reviewed journal articles published in 2008–2011. Four main questions guide the review: (1) What types of research have been published on micro-blogging in education? (2) How was micro-blogging used in these studies? (3) © 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2012 BERA.
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What educational benefits did micro-blogging have on teaching and learning as found in these studies? and (4) What suggestions and recommendations did published research generate for micro-blogging in education practice and future research? The critical review provides a number of suggestions among which, for example, were establishing relevance for students or modelling effective Twitter use, and the paper recommends further studies, especially in the informal context of education. Finally, Melody M. Terras and Judith Ramsay’s paper “The five central psychological challenges facing effective mobile learning” gives an overview of the emerging challenges in the use of mobile and social media for learning from a psychological point of view. While emphasising the opportunities of these technologies for learning, the authors warn that, because of psychological considerations, learners may encounter a number of challenges when using Web 2.0 applications via mobile devices for mobile learning. Indeed, given the limits of our cognitive system and considering individual differences among learners, it must be recognised that learning on the move may be a challenging process and that a psychological understanding of users’ skills, motivations and preferences is fundamental for understanding this learning experience. This suggests that to optimize mobile learning experience, learning tasks and materials should be sensitive to these psychological challenges. At the same time, to better exploit the potential of these technologies learners must possess the appropriate profile of psychological skills (eg, highorder cognitive skills such as meta-cognition which should help learners to manage the cognitive load generated by the experience of learning in a ubiquitous context). In summary, the overall impression that the papers in this special issue provide is that in the growing socio-technical process of convergence between social and mobile technologies there are grounds for reconceptualising some key issues of professional learning in new media context as well as for reconsidering old debates on digital technologies and educational institutions at the interface between formal and informal education. Beyond the specific theoretical perspectives that characterise the papers in this edition, one common message emerges: to understand the complex relationships between education and social/mobile technologies, a key role is played by users’ agency and the social practices of media appropriation. There is no place for techno-centric rhetoric, but only for a careful and cautious consideration of the interplay between education, social practices and technological change. Norbert Pachler, Maria Ranieri, Stefania Manca and John Cook Address for correspondence: Dr Stefania Manca, ITD-CNR, Via De Marini 6, Genova 16149, Italy. Email:
[email protected] References Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity: conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boyd, D. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 1, 210–230. Merchant, G. (2012). Unravelling the social network: theory and research. Learning, Media and Technology, 37, 1, 4–19. Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. & Cook, J. (2010). Mobile learning: structures, agency, practices. New York: Springer. Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: the next social revolution. New York: Basic Books. Wenger, E., White, N. & Smith, J. D. (2009). Digital habitats: stewarding technology for communities. Portland, OR: CPsquare.
© 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2012 BERA.
