Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments

 

Special Issue on: "Facebook as an Educational Tool"

Editor:
Dr. Qiyun Wang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

With the rapid development of information and communication technology, many virtual social tools – such as Facebook, msn, Linkedin, Google +, Twitter, weblogs and wikis – are available on the Internet for people to communicate and interact with others. Among the tools, Facebook is likely to be the most popular social media platform used by students. This special issue invites papers to report on various ways of using Facebook as an educational tool for teaching and learning.

Facebook was not initially designed for educational purposes. Because of its social affordances, however, it has great potential for teaching and learning. It can be used by a teacher as a learning management system to share course resources with students and conduct discussions, by a group of students to support their group collaboration, or as a social platform to improve the student-student or student-teacher relationship.

Nevertheless, the use of Facebook may also have implementation issues. For instance, some students may not want their teachers to be their online friends, or do not want social friends to know about their academic performance in a course. Also, there might be cyber safety concerns.

Rather than reporting the use of various social media tools, this issue will focus on using Facebook as an educational tool. Research and conceptual papers related to the use of Facebook for teaching and learning, such as social learning theories, personal experiences, practical design of Facebook-mediated learning environments and implementation issues and concerns of using Facebook for teaching and learning, are welcome.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Social learning theories or models
• Learning motivation and Facebook
• Literature review on using Facebook in education
• Pedagogical and social affordances of Facebook for teaching and learning
• Instructional strategies for effective use of Facebook
• Practical experiences of using Facebook for teaching and learning
• Case studies of Facebook in education
• Implementation issues and/or concerns with using Facebook for learning
• Facebook-mediated collaborative/interactive/social learning environments
• Design considerations for Facebook-mediated learning environments
• Challenges of classroom management in Facebook-mediated learning environments
• Facebook for collaborative learning
• Formal and informal learning with Facebook
• Teachers' professional development using Facebook
• Effects of using Facebook for teaching and learning
• Using Facebook as an online learning community or a knowledge building community
• Content generation or knowledge creation on Facebook
• Promoting 21st century competencies using Facebook

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Full paper submission: 30 April, 2013

Notification of acceptance: 15 June, 2013

Final submission: 31 July, 2013