Research into social media and learning, and motivations for learning in these spaces has tended, to date, to focus on: use of specific tools and technologies (e.g. Ferdig et al 2008, Pearson 2009); social media habits of young people (e.g. boyd 2007, Ito et al 2010); or behaviours of specific niche communities (e.g. Proctor & Williams 2010, Duke and Jordan Ltd 2011, McCulloch, McIntosh and Barratt 2011).
Facebook dominated research into the use of specific social media spaces in publications such as First Monday (e.g. Ferdig et al 2008, Pearson 2009) and the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking (e.g. Rouis 2012), until the emergence of Twitter in research around 2010 (e.g. Zhao and Rosson 2009, Ball and Lewis 2011). Interest in Facebook should not be surprising given the huge uptake and media interest in the site as evidenced, for instance, by Facebook being the most searched-for brand in the UK in 2011 (Experian Hitwise 2012). However Facebook emerged into the mainstream at a time of significant existing research interest in MySpace and there is a sense in the literature that many of those who had been investigating MySpace began transferring attention to the new and (initially) similar-looking Facebook as MySpace began to lose favour following its sale to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (see Arora 2012).
Early adopters of social networking sites were disproportionately young; Facebook famously launched first to university students, establishing a community of young adult users before launching to the wider public. Perhaps as a result of this, and early Facebook privacy concerns, there is a significant body of work on young people and Facebook, particularly the work of danah boyd (boyd 2007, Ito et al 2010) and Mimi Ito (e.g. Ito et al 2010, Ito 2010). There has also been notable research on social media and young people’s information seeking behaviours (e.g. CIBER 2010, Connoway, Dickey and Radford 2011). The focus on young people places much of this work in relation to formal education practices and institutions, with informal learning tending to refer to class work or social norms. However some informal learning processes documented have wider applicability (e.g. Ito et al 2010), in particular the exchange of knowledge around common interests and niche communities, drawing upon John Paul Gee’s work on “affinity spaces” (Gee 2004) and peer learning around video games (Gee 2008).
Efimova et al’s (2004) work on the use of weblog networks as distributed apprenticeship models is of particular interest here as the authors connect emergent practice - such as creative “stealing” and refining of blog posts – to informal peer learning networks, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolds that support the learner to grasp threshold concepts (Meyer & Land 2006).
Research into professional development and social media has tended to be limited to sector-specific examinations. In my own field of UK Further and Higher Education research from JISC (Duke and Jordan Ltd. 2011), CIBER (2010) and RIN (Proctor and Williams 2010) focused on professional exchanges of ideas, peer networking and researcher attitudes to new technology. A mixed ecology of usage was found but these reports do find scholarly communications – a key form of professional learning and peer correction – taking place in social media.
A variety of ongoing research projects are currently examining informal learning and social media. Many are in early stages, with only preliminary outlines or findings published - such as Sharma et al’s (2010) work tracing the sharing routes of information. Others take the form of reflective discussions, with many, like Jenkins, Ford and Green (in press), still in press. Such work indicates the growing interest in informal learning processes in social media amongst the research community.
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