Fostering Collaborative Learning

with Social Media Tools

Elvira Popescu

University of Craiova, Romania

My Hometown & University

Outline

Introduction - Social media & education

Practical usage scenarios

Special-purpose Web 2.0 tools for educational use

Extending general-purpose social media tools with educational support features

Building dedicated stand-alone educational social media tools

Integrating multiple social media tools in fully-fledged educational platforms

eMUSE social learning environment

Conclusion

My Book

INTRODUCTION

Collaborative Learning

“A variety of educational practices in which interactions among peers constitute the

most important factor in learning, although without excluding other factors such as the

learning material and interactions with teachers” (Dillenbourg et al., 2009)

“Students are working in groups of two or more, mutually searching for understanding,

solutions, or meanings, or creating a product” (Smith & MacGregor, 1992)

CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning) has flourished, especially with the

advent of the Web and, more recently, the Web 2.0

Social Media & Education

Education must keep up with the needs of the digital native students

Solution: social learning environments

Find the right content

Connect with the right people

Make learning more gratifying (Vassileva, 2008)

Social media enhance the sense of community between learners

Good correspondence between the affordances of Web 2.0 and the fundamentals

of some effective pedagogical approaches

PRACTICAL USAGE

SCENARIOS

Wikis in Education

Students:

Produce a collaboratively edited material

Incrementally accumulate and organize knowledge

Document each stage of a project

Provide feedback on peers' writing

Publish a summary of readings

Comment on teacher published material

Annotate lecture notes

Integrate resources from different Web sources

Contribute to a public wiki and receive feedback

Teachers:

Build a repository of educational resources

Create an annotated reading list

Provide scaffolding for writing activities

Create a collective textbook with peers

Blogs in Education

Students:

Create a portfolio from a collection of student assignments

Maintain a learning diary

Publish ideas and interesting findings related to the course

Share blogs of interest by adding them to the blogroll

Reflect on the reading material

Introduce oneself to peers in distance-learning settings

Document the progress of the project / learning activity

Describe problems encountered, ask for help and receive feedback from peers

Write constructive comments

Communicate and collaborate with peers

Teachers:

Post course announcements and news

Publish lecture resources

Provide feedback to students

Social Bookmarking Services in Education

Students:

Build collections of resources of interest for the course / project

Share items of common interest with group peers

Check / discover the resources shared by peers

Tag and organize the resources in categories

Visualize the tag cloud of an item and compare it with student's own categorization

Find peers with similar interests based on their lists of bookmarks / tags

Teachers:

Build up reading lists and resource lists

Evaluate the usefulness of a resource by counting the number of bookmarks

Track students' list of updates

Facebook in Education

(McBride & Hall, 2012) – Introductory Psychology course

Role-play assignment create the Facebook profile of a famous psychologist

Connect with the class – "friend" the course page and all the peers

Build the Facebook page

Information – comprehensive biography

Photos – to help bring the subject to life

Links to various resources associated to the psychologist

Notes – 4-5 postings describing the theoretical model proposed by the psychologist &

reflecting on the validity of the model and its current status in psychology

Creative aspect – bumper stickers, bookshelves, psychology gifts, quizzes

Visit peer pages, communicate with peers, add comments and critiques

Learners "become co-designers in the process and this, together with the natural

playfulness of the medium, creates an empowering and productive learning

experience"

SPECIAL-PURPOSE

WEB 2.0 TOOLS FOR EDUCATIONAL USE

Classification of Design Approaches

Extending general-purpose social media tools with educational support features

Building dedicated stand-alone educational social media tools

Integrating multiple social media tools in fully-fledged educational platforms

Comparison of Design Approaches

Comparison of Design Approaches

EXTENDING GENERAL-PURPOSE

SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS WITH

EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT FEATURES

Category 1 - Examples

Wikis

Co-Writing Wiki (Al-Smadi et al., 2011)

CoLearn (Popescu et al., 2014)

Tracking Bundle (Kubincova et al., 2012)

Blogs

EduFeedr (Poldoja, 2010)

LePress (Tomberg et al., 2010)

Category 1 - CoLearn

Creates various MediaWiki special pages, for creating group projects, adding students

to projects, visualizing projects and statistics, monitoring student activity etc.

Extends the MediaWiki database with information regarding student groups, project

pages, revision types, collaborative actions, ratings, comments, grades

Uses the hooks provided by MediaWiki to add the new functionalities, which allow

custom code (event handlers) to be executed when some defined event occurs

CoLearn – Project Dashboard (1)

CoLearn – Project Dashboard (2)

CoLearn – Student Profile Page

CoLearn – Peer Review Functionality

BUILDING DEDICATED STAND-ALONE

EDUCATIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

Category 2 - Examples

Wikis

ClassroomWiki (Khandaker & Soh, 2010)

Social tagging

ASK-LOST 2.0 (Sampson et al., 2011)

SparTag.us (Nelson et al., 2009)

TaCS (Lavoué, 2012)

Social networking services

Lintend (Popescu & Ghita, 2013)

TUT Circle (Silius et al., 2010)

Category 2 - Lintend

Build complex profiles (both for individuals and institutions)

Create and join classes

Add social contacts

Create and share educational resources (courses, tutorials, articles, solved

assignments) which can be recommended and commented on

Post news and comments

Send and receive private messages

Visualize timeline and receive notifications for events of interest

Receive suggestions for resources and classes of potential interest

INTEGRATING MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA

TOOLS IN FULLY-FLEDGED

EDUCATIONAL PLATFORMS

Category 3 - Examples

Learning Management Systems (LMS) which include social media modules

Moodle Wiki Activity & Blocks such as Blog, Remote RSS feeds, Tags,

YouTube

OpenSocial plugin (Bogdanov et al., 2014) allows teachers to add

widgets either as modules or as blocks

Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

MUPPLE (Wild et al., 2011)

PLEF(Chatti et al., 2010)

Graasp (Bogdanov et al., 2012)

eMUSE (Popescu, 2014)

Category 3 - eMUSE

empowering MashUps for Social E-learning

Provides integrated access to the Web 2.0 tools selected by the instructor: common

access point, detailed usage instructions, summary of the latest activity

Retrieves students’ actions with each tool and stores them in a local database

Offers a summary of each student’s activity, including graphical visualization, evolution

over time, comparisons with peers, as well as aggregated data

eMUSE – Initial Version

eMUSE 2.0 – View Actions

eMUSE 2.0 – View Statistics

eMUSE 2.0 – Create Evaluation Forms

eMUSE 2.0 – View Evaluation Forms

eMUSE 2.0 – Evaluate Peers

eMUSE 2.0 – View Peers’ Activity Charts

eMUSE 2.0 – View Received Evaluations

eMUSE 2.0 – View Student Scores

eMUSE 2.0 – View Student Rating Charts

eMUSE – Instructional Scenario

7 years (2010/2011 – 2016/2017) 375 students from the University of Craiova

Course on Web Applications’ Design

Project-based learning (PBL) approach

Task: development of an authentic Web application

Collaborate in teams of 3-4 peers, with real-life roles

Blended mode: weekly face-to-face meetings + social media tools & eMUSE

MediaWiki collaborative writing tasks, gather and organize team knowledge and

resources, document the project

Blogger report the progress of the project (“learning diary”), publish ideas and

resources, provide feedback and solutions to peer problems

Twitter encourage additional connects to peers, post short news, announcements,

questions, and status updates regarding each project

Four intermediary project presentations engage students more and discourage

the practice of activity peak at the end of the semester

Grading took into account both the final project and the collaborative work carried

throughout the semester

eMUSE - Peer Evaluation Activity

Formative peer evaluation activity integrated in the learning scenario

Students were asked to assess the quality of their peers' work and presentations

for each intermediary milestone

for the final product

Each student had one team assigned for evaluation, whose work they had to follow

throughout the semester

individual contributions

overall team activity

Students’ Feedback

At the end of the semester, students were asked to fill in a survey regarding their

overall learning experience

Sample results from one semester:

Overall satisfaction Team work

Future courses Comparison with a traditional project

Current Work: Learning Analytics

Analyze social media learner traces

Predict academic performance & differences in learning styles

Various classification & regression algorithms, PCA

Textual complexity analysis

Social network analysis

Content analysis based on Community of Inquiry model

Project: A collaborative learning framework based on social media tools: a focus on

learning analytics (CoLSoM)

http://software.ucv.ro/~epopescu/colsom

More Info

E. Popescu, Providing Collaborative Learning Support with Social Media in an Integrated Environment,

World Wide Web, Springer, vol. 17 (2), pp. 199-212, 2014.

M.C. Mihaescu, P.S. Popescu, E. Popescu, Data analysis on social media traces for detection of

"spam" and "don't care" learners, Journal of Supercomputing, Springer, 2017.

E. Popescu, L.M. Petrosanu, Integrating a Peer Evaluation Module in a Social Learning Platform,

Innovations in Smart Learning, Lecture Notes in Educational Technology, Springer, pp. 141-150, 2016.

M. Dascalu, E. Popescu, A. Becheru, S. Crossley, S. Trausan-Matu, Predicting Academic Performance

Based on Students' Blog and Microblog Posts, Proc. EC-TEL 2016, LNCS 9891, Springer, pp. 370-

376, 2016.

E. Popescu, M. Dascalu, A. Becheru, S. Crossley, S. Trausan-Matu, Predicting Student Performance

and Differences in Learning Styles based on Textual Complexity Indices applied on Blog and

Microblog Posts. A Preliminary Study, Proc. ICALT 2016, pp. 184-188, 2016.

P.S. Popescu, M.C. Mihaescu, E. Popescu, M. Mocanu, Using Ranking and Multiple Linear

Regression to Explore the Impact of Social Media Engagement on Student Performance, Proc. ICALT

2016, pp. 250-254, 2016.

E. Popescu, Z. Kubincova, M. Homola, Blogging Activities in Higher Education: Comparing Learning

Scenarios in Multiple Course Experiences, Proc. ICWL 2015, LNCS 9142, Springer, 2015.

E. Popescu, Investigating Students’ Blogging Activity in Project-Based Learning Settings, Lecture

Notes in Educational Technology, Springer, pp. 145-155, 2015.

E. Popescu, Approaches to Designing Social Media-based Learning Spaces, Proc. BCI '15 (7th Balkan

Conference on Informatics), article no. 40, ACM, 2015.

More Info

E. Popescu, Using Wikis to Support Project-Based Learning: A Case Study, Proc. ICALT 2014, IEEE

Computer Society Press, pp. 305-309, 2014.

E. Popescu, C. Maria, A. L. Udriştoiu, Fostering Collaborative Learning with Wikis: Extending

MediaWiki with Educational Features, Proc. ICWL 2014, LNCS 8613, pp. 22-31, Springer, 2014.

E. Popescu, D. Ghita, Using Social Networking Services to Support Learning, Proc. ICWL 2013, LNCS

8167, pp. 184-193, Springer, 2013.

C. Giovannella, E. Popescu, F. Scaccia, A PCA Study of Student Performance Indicators in a Web 2.0-

based Learning Environment, Proc. ICALT 2013, pp. 33-35, 2013.

F. Leon, E. Popescu, Exploring the Relationships between Students' Learning Styles and Social Media

Use in Educational Settings, Proc. ICSTCC 2013, pp. 657-662, 2013.

E. Popescu, Project-Based Learning with eMUSE: An Experience Report, Proc. ICWL 2012, LNCS

7558, pp. 41-50, Springer.

CONCLUSION

Conclusion

Social media-based learning spaces are on the rise

Increasing adoption rates of social media among students and teachers

Rising awareness on the importance played by the pedagogical features and

instructional strategies in addition to the technologies

Trends:

Develop dedicated Web 2.0-based learning environments, which incorporate

pedagogically valuable features alongside social media tools

Extend the range of available functionalities

Encourage large-scale use of these platforms

Perform more extensive experimental studies

Contact:

popescu_elvira@software.ucv.ro

Homepage:

http://software.ucv.ro/~epopescu/

THANK YOU!

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for

Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number

PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-2604.