Designing and evaluating social media for learning: shaping social networking into social learning?

Although the adoption of social media (or Web 2.0 technologies) within our everyday lives is relatively recent, many have attempted to embrace these technologies and related digital literacies for learning in educational institutions and the workplace. The state of the art in this respect before 2010 was reflected in two key publications edited by the editors of this Special Issue. These were a special issue in this journal on social software, Web 2.0, and learning (Ravenscroft 2009), and a Handbook of Research on Social Software & Developing Community Ontologies (Hatzipanagos & Warburton 2009). These covered a wide range of perspectives and projects that collectively conveyed the energy and enthusiasm for embracing more open and participative approaches to learning, mainly through applying and adapting existing social media technologies, such as weblogs (blogs), wikis, and popular social networking tools (e.g. Facebook). This collection of work also uncovered some deep misalignments and paradoxes in the context of traditional education: