The question addressed is whether, in connection with education, Twitter can be considered both a communication centre and an affiliation space, where virtual communities with shared interests are formed. The 6654 tweets containing the "#education" or "#educación" hashtag sent on specific days in 2014, 2015 and 2016 defined the…

Knowledge elaboration plays a critical role in promoting knowledge acquisition and facilitating the retention of target knowledge in online collaborative discussions. Adopting a key-term-based automated analysis approach, we proposed an indicator framework to measure the level of knowledge elaboration in terms of coverage, activation, and…

This contribution aims at (1) discussing the characteristics of collecting, filing and storing data to have a databank of oral interactions between university students whose main objective is the learning of a second language through teletandem; and (2) defining the steps for further collections and storage. Our data are Skype sessions of foreign…

Social media platforms such as Facebook are commonplace throughout society. However, within higher education institutions such networking environments are still in the developmental stage. This paper describes and discusses case study data from the Open University's Faculty of Social Science Facebook page. It starts by giving an overview of the…

A large-scale online teacher resource exchange is studied to examine the ways in which metadata influence teachers' selection of resources. A hierarchical linear modeling approach was used to tease apart the simultaneous effects of resource features and author features. From a decision heuristics theoretical perspective, teachers appear to…

This article presents an adaptation of established qualitative research methods for online focus groups by using the "Disqus" website-based commenting platform as a medium for discussion among doctoral and early-career academic learners. Facilities allowing Internet users to comment on the content of web pages are increasingly popular on…

The challenging of assessing formal and informal online learning at scale includes various issues. Many universities who are now promoting "Massive Online Open Courses" (MOOC), for instance, focus on relatively informal assessment of participant competence, which is not highly "quality assured". This paper reports best…

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments…

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

The nature of collaborative learning involves intensive interactions among collaborators, such as articulating knowledge into written, verbal or symbolic forms, authoring articles or posting messages to this community's discussion forum, responding or adding comments to messages or articles posted by others, etc. Knowledge collaborators'…

Many of those now accessing archives through online finding aids are encountering primary materials (albeit virtually) for the first time. These users are often unfamiliar with finding aid structure, terminology, and principles. This article reports on a qualitative, exploratory study of a subset of these novice users. The study concentrated on…

Purpose: The motivation for this investigation is to apply social networking features to a semantic network portal, which supports the efforts in enterprise training units to up-skill the employee in the company, and facilitates the creation and reuse of knowledge in online communities. Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides an overview…