Social media tools have been used in educational settings for several years, with good results with regard to student satisfaction, motivation and/or learning gain. In an attempt to exploit this Web 2.0 potential for education, many researchers have started to design social media-based environments for educational use, enhanced with dedicated learning support features. This paper provides a classification and synthesis of the proposed approaches, offering a comparative review of the design solutions. Three main categories are identified, each of which being analyzed and illustrated with representative systems: i) extending general-purpose social media tools with educational support features; ii) building dedicated stand-alone educational social media tools; iii) integrating multiple social media tools in fully-fledged educational platforms.
['Elvira Popescu']
Approaches to Designing Social Media-based Learning Spaces