SoMeRe: Knowledge Media for Continuing Professional Development

Recent developments in social media offer the interesting prospect that current ‘educational content methods and practices’ based on traditional media will become rapidly replaced by social knowledge interactions. These knowledge interactions are delivered and maintained by social media, and will be interactive, open, social and personal of nature. To gain insight and experience with this prospect, we started the development of the Social Media Research Centre, in short SoMeRe (www.somere.nl). We apply SoMeRe in our Communication Studies education and research as a ‘testbed’ for scenarios for future deployment of collaborative learning and continuing professionalization. This paper describes this design research. We describe SoMeRe, the ideas behind it, its use and the insights and preliminary experiences. This paper describes the design of social knowledge interactions as communication means related to learning processes and continuing professional development.