Funded by a $478,622 Insight Grant (2013-2018) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada(SSHRC).
This major five-year (2013-2018) research initiative is designed to address the question “How do social media networks influence educational models?” The project involves developing novel learning analytics for the social media age. Learning analytics is “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.” One of the primary goals of this initiative is to devise new theoretical and technical solutions that will help educators and researchers to study learning processes in social media. Another goal of the initiative is to provide educators and learners with tools that will help them to determine whether their particular use of social media is beneficial to their teaching or learning.
Researchers
Principal Investigators:
- Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Toronto MetropolitanUniversity
- Dr. Caroline Haythornthwaite, Syracuse University
Postdoctoral Fellows:
- Priya Kumar, Toronto Metropolitan University
- Nadia Conroy, Toronto Metropolitan University
Doctoral students:
- Drew Paulin, Doctoral Candidate, iSchool, University of British Columbia
- Sarah Gilbert, Doctoral Candidate, iSchool, University of British Columbia
- James Lannigan, Doctoral Candidate, iSchool, University of Toronto
Collaborators:
- Dr. Marc Esteve Del Valle, University of Groningen
Former Collaborators:
- Dr. Rafa Absar, Department of Computer Science, Clarkson University
- Dr. Regina Collins, Information Systems, New Jersey Institute of Technology
- Dr. Xiao Hu, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Recent publications
- Esteve Del Valle, M., Gruzd, A., Haythornthwaite, C., Paulin, D., & Gilbert, S. (2017). Social Media in Educational Practice: Faculty Present and Future Use of Social Media in Teaching. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Available at https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/41169
- Collins, R., & Gruzd, A. (2017). Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Available at https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/41407
- Gruzd, A., Paulin, D., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2016). Analyzing Social Media and Learning Through Content and Social Network Analysis: A Faceted Methodological Approach. Journal of Learning Analytics 3(3), 46-71. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/JLA/article/view/4638/5753 [Open Access]
- Gruzd, A., Haythornthwaite, C., Paulin, D., Gilbert, S., & Esteve del Valle, M. (2016). Uses and gratifications factors for social media use in teaching: Instructors’ perspectives. New Media and Society. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/08/08/1461444816662933.abstract [Pre-print Open Access]
- Absar, R., Gruzd, A., Haythornthwaite, C., & Paulin, D. (2016). Linking Online Identities and Content in Connectivist MOOCs Across Multiple Social Media Platforms. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (pp. 483–488). http://doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890458
- Gilbert, S., & Paulin, D. (2015). Tweet to learn: Expertise and centrality in conference Twitter networks. In Proceedings of the 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Retrieved from http://conferences.computer.org/hicss/2015/papers/7367b920.pdf
- Paulin, D., Gilbert, S., Haythornthwaite, C., Gruzd, A., & Absar, R. (2015). Beyond the backchannel: Leveraging Twitter to enact learning processes. In Proceedings of the 2015 iConference. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/73779
- Gruzd, A., Haythornthwaite, C., Paulin, D., Absar, R. and Huggett, M. (2014). Learning analytics for the social media age. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Learning Analytics And Knowledge (LAK ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 254-256. DOI:10.1145/2567574.2576773