Students' Out-of-School Writing Practices in an Educational Facebook Application

Author(s):  
Thor Gibbins ◽  
Christine Greenhow

In this chapter, the authors seek to help educators understand trends in students' writing outside of the classroom, with a particular emphasis on illuminating students' purposes and practices in writing within social media spaces. The authors synthesize current research on students' Internet and social media practices and offer a case study from their own research on students' writing within an educational Facebook application called Hot Dish. This chapter seeks to elucidate the reciprocal relationship between students out of school writing using popular social media and their in-school practices. Ultimately, the authors seek to help readers make connections between what students are doing with new media in their leisure time and the improvement of students' writing performance in K-12 settings, believing there may be important but under-explored synergies.

2015 ◽  
pp. 1010-1026
Author(s):  
Thor Gibbins ◽  
Christine Greenhow

In this chapter, the authors seek to help educators understand trends in students' writing outside of the classroom, with a particular emphasis on illuminating students' purposes and practices in writing within social media spaces. The authors synthesize current research on students' Internet and social media practices and offer a case study from their own research on students' writing within an educational Facebook application called Hot Dish. This chapter seeks to elucidate the reciprocal relationship between students out of school writing using popular social media and their in-school practices. Ultimately, the authors seek to help readers make connections between what students are doing with new media in their leisure time and the improvement of students' writing performance in K-12 settings, believing there may be important but under-explored synergies.


Author(s):  
Nurzali Ismail

This study investigated youth’s usage of new media technologies in and out of school as well as how it relates to learning and identity formation. Even though youth’s usage of new media in school is inferior compared to out of school, it does not mean that both contexts are disconnected. In fact, there is a possible relationship established between both contexts and such connection can prove to be significant for youth’s learning and identity formation. Communities of Practice (COPs) was adopted as the theoretical foundation of the study. The research method employed was case study. Data collection involved six 13 years old students from two secondary schools in Malaysia. They were interviewed, directly observed during classes and tasked to complete a media diary out of school. The findings of the study indicate that, despite the differences in youth’s new media practices in and out of school, relationship exists between both contexts through the multi-membership dimensions of COPs. It was also found that, the experience of participating in different practices in and out of school is significant for youth’s formation of identity. Learning is embedded within youth’s participation in everyday new media practices. Hence, it is important for schools to understand youth’s new media experience and to relate it with classroom learning.


Author(s):  
Shaun Kellogg ◽  
Sherry Booth ◽  
Kevin Oliver

<p>A recent phenomenon in the MOOC space has been the development of courses tailored to educators serving in K-12 settings. MOOCs, particularly as a form of educator professional development, face a number of challenges. Academics, as well as pundits from traditional and new media, have raised a number of concerns about MOOCs, including the lack of instructional and social supports. It is an assumption of this study that challenges arising form this problem of scale can be addressed by leveraging these massive numbers to develop robust online learning communities. This mixed-methods case study addresses critical gaps in the literature and issues of peer support in MOOCs through an examination of the characteristics, mechanisms, and outcomes of peer networks. Findings from this study demonstrate that even with technology as basic as a discussion forum, MOOCs can be leveraged to foster these networks and facilitate peer-supported learning. Although this study was limited to two unique cases along the wide spectrum of MOOCs, the methods applied provide other researchers with an approach for better understanding the dynamic process of peer supported learning in MOOCs.</p>


Author(s):  
Ruth Grüters ◽  
Knut Ove Eliassen

AbstractTo understand the success of SKAM, the series’ innovative use of “social media” must be taken into consideration. The article follows two lines of argument, one diachronic, the other synchronic. The concept of remediation allows for a historical perspective that places the series in a longer tradition of “real time”-fictions and media practices that span from the epistolary novels of the 18th century by way of radio theatre and television serials to the new media of the 21st century. Framing the series within the current media ecology (marked by the connectivity logic of “social media”), the authors analyze how the choice of the blog as the drama’s media platform has formed the ways the series succeeded in affecting and mobilizing its audience. Given the long tradition of strong pedagogical premises in the teenager serials of publicly financed Norwegian television, the authors note the absence of any explicit media critical perspectives or didacticism. Nevertheless, the claim is that the media-practices of the series, as well as the actions and discourses of its followers (blogposts, facebook-groups, etc.), generate new insights and knowledge with regards to the series’ form, content, and practices.


Author(s):  
Abdul Malik Omar

Digital technology is at the forefront of transforming how governments operate around the world. Using Brunei's Information Department (InfoDept) as a case study, this chapter looks at how the agency has evolved from its inception in the 1950s to 2019 in its embrace of both old and new media to pursue its mission and objectives as a government-run media agency. The results demonstrate how new media, such as social media, can complement old media if done right. The case study on InfoDept contributes to the growing field of research related to the increased advancement, development, application, and impact of new technologies in bolstering the digital governance process. This chapter also provides strong evidence on how governments can improve its general governance process and unlock the digital dividend in the 21st century by incorporating new media into its public policy architectonic. Salient lessons for policymakers and practitioners on digital governance have also been presented in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Olu Jenzen ◽  
Itir Erhart ◽  
Hande Eslen-Ziya ◽  
Umut Korkut ◽  
Aidan McGarry

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Mutsvairo ◽  
Helge Rønning

The purpose of this issue of Media Culture and Society is to discuss the possible role of social media in the struggle for democracy, against authoritarianism, and over hidden power structures. The articles included in this volume are meant to offer empirical interventions to beliefs, some of them unproven, on whether the emergence of new media technologies has driven Africa towards democratic change. Papers in this Special Issue cover a wide variety of African countries delving deep into comparative studies of participatory citizens’ media on the continent. This introduction is an attempt to offer an explanation on African democratisation and authoritarianism before conceptualising the role of social media in political processes with the backing of current case study dispatches in Africa, demonstrating the dilemmas of digital disparities in promoting or denting democratisation in Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-215
Author(s):  
Ratan Kumar Roy

Politics online is a significant phenomenon today in Bangladesh given the reach of internet, resulting in the proliferation of the use of social media and online activism. The intertwined dynamic of digital drive and mediated politics can be traced in other parts of the region of South Asia as a burgeoning spectacle. In this context, the instance of Bangladesh with regard to online activism provides distinctive clues to fathom the nature of mediated politics. This paper examines a social media-driven youth protest, Shahbag Movement in 2013 to unravel the interactive dynamics between new media, traditional media and social movement. Bringing in the empirical cases, in the ultimate analysis, it delves deeper into the conceptual aspects of media practices, mediation and mediatisation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-572
Author(s):  
Nadine Keller ◽  
Tina Askanius

An increasingly organized culture of hate is flourishing in today’s online spaces, posing a serious challenge for democratic societies. Our study seeks to unravel the workings of online hate on popular social media and assess the practices, potentialities, and limitations of organized counterspeech to stymie the spread of hate online. This article is based on a case study of an organized “troll army” of online hate speech in Germany, Reconquista Germanica, and the counterspeech initiative Reconquista Internet. Conducting a qualitative content analysis, we first unpack the strategies and stated intentions behind organized hate speech and counterspeech groups as articulated in their internal strategic documents. We then explore how and to what extent such strategies take shape in online media practices, focusing on the interplay between users spreading hate and users counterspeaking in the comment sections of German news articles on Facebook. The analysis draws on a multi-dimensional framework for studying social media engagement (Uldam & Kaun, 2019) with a focus on practices and discourses and turns to Mouffe’s (2005) concepts of political antagonism and agonism to operationalize and deepen the discursive dimension. The study shows that the interactions between the two opposing camps are highly moralized, reflecting a post-political antagonistic battle between “good” and “evil” and showing limited signs of the potentials of counterspeech to foster productive agonism. The empirical data indicates that despite the promising intentions of rule-guided counterspeech, the counter efforts identified and scrutinized in this study predominantly fail to adhere to civic and moral standards and thus only spur on the destructive dynamics of digital hate culture.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ty Hollett ◽  
Jeremiah (Remi) Kalir

In this article, we analyze the production of learner-generated playgrids. Playgrids are produced when learners knit together social media tools to participate across settings and scales, accomplish their goals, pursue interests, and make their learning more enjoyable and personally meaningful. Through case study methodology we examine how two platforms - Slack and Hypothesis - enabled learners to curate and participate among their own digital resources and pathways for learning. We contend that both theoretical and pedagogical development is necessary to support adult learners as they curate tools and pathways based upon their contingent needs and goals, and that the concept of playgrids does so by usefully connecting less formal social media practice with more formal professional learning across various settings and scales. In the end, we demonstrate the importance of honoring learners' desire to connect their completion of formal course activities with their less formal social media practices; both sets of practices need not be in conflict and may be complementary.


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