Call for papers: "Using Social Media for Collaborative Learning"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments.

Collaboration has numerous potential benefits for learning. It enables group members to help and learn from one another; it helps to promote students’ social relationships; it may also develop students’ communication and critical thinking skills.

However, there are also a lot of challenges in the collaborative learning process. For instance, how can a teacher know that every student contributes to the completion of a project? How can group members coordinate their strengths and efforts? And how can a teacher effectively monitor the collaborative learning process and fairly assess individual contribution?

By using a social media platform such as Facebook Group, certain evidence can be automatically recorded and this evidence enables the teacher to monitor students’ progress and their individual contributions. Also, the recorded evidence may allow the teacher to fairly assess students’ contributions. Nevertheless, there might be challenges in using online platforms to support group collaboration too. For instance, students may not use the platform at all.

This special issue aims to provide an opportunity for researchers to share their experiences, case studies, thoughts and innovative strategies for using social media platforms to promote, coordinate, monitor and assess collaborative learning effectively.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Using social media platforms (such as Facebook Group, Google Group, Yahoo Group, Edmodo, Wiki, Weblog) to support group collaboration
• Using social media to effectively coordinate group members' collaborative efforts
• Using social media to promote group members' positive interdependence
• Using social media to monitor group members' individual contributions
• Using social media to support peer evaluation
• Using social media to facilitate the assessment of students' contributions and learning outcomes
• Case studies of using specific social media platforms to support group collaboration
• Strategies and challenges of using social media to support collaborative learning
• Design and evaluation of social media apps for collaborative learning
• Assessment of collaborative learning

Important Dates

Submission of manuscripts: 31 July, 2013

Notification to authors: 15 September, 2013

Final versions due: 31 October, 2013