Purpose: Because health misinformation pertaining to COVID-19 is a serious threat to public health, the purpose of this study is to develop a framework to guide an online intervention into some of the drivers of health misinformation online. This framework can be iterated upon through the use of design-based research to continue to develop further…

The use of social media in academics' lives is well documented; however, researchers have a limited understanding about whether, why and how academics' social media use changes over time. Through interviews with 12 scholars, we identify multiple reasons that lead them to change their use of social media over time. Specifically, scholars report…

A growing body of research reveals that some scholars face online harassment and that such harassment leads to a wide variety of adverse impacts. Drawing on data collected from an online survey of 182 scholars, we report on the factors and triggers involved in scholars' experiences of online harassment; the environments where said experiences take…

The aim of this investigation was to gain an understanding of the use of institutional social media accounts by graduate departments. This study focused particularly on the social media accounts of instructional design (ID) graduate programs. Content and statistical analyses were conducted to examine 24,948 tweets posted by ID programs (n = 22) on…

This study utilizes public data mining to explore participation divides of all available K-12 institutional Twitter accounts in the U.S. (n = 8275 accounts, n = 9,216,853 tweets). Results indicated that U.S. schools used Twitter to broadcast information on a variety of topics in a unidirectional manner and that hashtags included a variety of…

Researchers have proposed that social media provide complementary learning environments for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that might engender participation, engagement, and peer-support. Although suggestive, nearly all of the research in this area consists of case studies, making it challenging to determine whether or to what extent findings…

This study employed data mining and quantitative methods to collect and analyze the available histories of primary Twitter accounts of institutions of higher education in the U.S. (n = 2411). The study comprises a sample of 5.7 million tweets, representing 62% of all tweets created by these accounts and the entire population of U.S. colleges and…

This study investigates the audiences that scholars imagine encountering online and the ways in which these audiences impact scholars' online participation and presentation of self. Prior research suggests that imagined audiences affect what users share and how they present themselves on social media, but little research has examined this topic in…

#PhDChat is an online network of individuals that has its roots to a group of UK doctoral students who began using Twitter in 2010 to hold discussions. Since then, the network around #PhDchat has evolved and grown. In this study, we examine this network using a mixed methods analysis of the tweets that were labeled with the hashtag over a…

As teacher education students become professionals, they face a number of tensions related to identity, social participation, and work-life balance, which may be further complicated by social networking sites (SNS). This qualitative study sought to articulate tensions that arose between professionalization influences and teacher education student…

The ways that emerging technologies and social media are used and experienced by researchers and educators are poorly understood and inadequately researched. The goal of this study is to examine the online practices of individual scholars in order to explore and understand the activities and practices that they enact when they use social media for…

Researchers claim that pedagogical agents engender opportunities for social learning in digital environments. Prior literature, however, has not thoroughly examined the discourse between agents and learners. To address this gap, we analyzed a data corpus of interactions between agents and learners using open coding methods. Analysis revealed that:…

While the potential of social networking sites to contribute to educational endeavors is highlighted by researchers and practitioners alike, empirical evidence on the use of such sites for formal online learning is scant. To fill this gap in the literature, we present a case study of learners' perspectives and experiences in an online course…

In this paper, we examine the meaning of conversing with pedagogical agents. Previous research has focused on examining cause and effect relationships, failing to take into account the meaning of the experiences individuals have when holding a dialogue with conversational agents for educational purposes. To understand these experiences, we have…

Conflicts occur when learners interact with pedagogical agents and virtual characters. Such conflicts--arising from technological limitations, psychosocial perceptions, and pedagogical inadequacies--hinder communication and interaction between virtual characters and learners, and impede successful engagement with learning tasks and experiences. To…