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Online social networks and learning

Article  in  On the Horizon · February 2011

DOI: 10.1108/10748121111107663

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Viewpoint

Online social networks and learning

Christine Greenhow

Christine Greenhow is an Abstract

Assistant Professor of Purpose – This viewpoint essay seeks to argue that young people’s online social networking can serve
Learning Sciences and as sites for and supports for student learning in ways not currently assessed.
Technology in the College
Design/methodology/approach – The two themes presented are based on a select review of the
of Education and College of
research literature as well as the author’s explorations of young people’s online social networking
Information Studies, practices within MySpace and Facebook, two naturally occurring, youth-initiated sites, as well as in an
University of Maryland, online social networking application designed for environmental science education and civic action.
College Park, Maryland,
Findings – Two themes are presented: (1) social network sites can serve as direct and indirect supports
USA. for learning, such as providing an emotional outlet for school-related stress, validation of creative work,
peer-alumni support for school-life transitions, and help with school-related tasks; and (2) online social
networking can stimulate social and civic benefits, online and offline, which has implications for
education.
Practical implications – Currently, social media are largely blocked in schools due to privacy, security,
and copyright concerns. In the USA, the National Educational Technology Plan published in November
2010, and recent educational standards, both assume 24/7 access and use of newer web technologies
for learning and advocate appropriation of technologies students already use, and prefer to use, for
educational purposes. Consideration of how social media, such as social network sites, currently
support informal learning may advance one’s ability to construct effective social media-enabled
environments for more formal learning purposes.
Originality/value – This paper presents concrete examples of how social network sites, typically seen
as a distraction, might be re-envisioned as supports for revised student learning outcomes.

Keywords Learning, Social networking sites, Literacy, Social interaction

Paper type Viewpoint

Changing educational contexts

In the last decade, internet access, the nature of the web and contexts for learning have
evolved, along with the emergence of desired competencies for learners, instructors, and
administrators, and these changes impact constructs for learning, teaching, and paths for
future research (Greenhow et al., 2009a, b); young people now have more choices over
what, how, and with whom they learn in a wide range of settings: classrooms, after school
programs, home-school, formal online learning programs, and web-enabled spaces that
dominate popular culture. Some of the most critical problems facing education today, as
generally agreed upon by administrators, policy-makers, and researchers, are increasing
young people’s educational attainment, science and math learning, technological fluencies,
communication skills, civic engagement and preparation for the twenty-first century
workplace (Black and Lynch, 2003; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007; Collins and Halverson,
2009; Dohm and Shniper, 2007; National Center for Education Statistics, 2005; National
Research Council, 2000; Putnam, 2000; Warschauer and Matuchniak, 2010).

PAGE 4 j ON THE HORIZON j VOL. 19 NO. 1 2011, pp. 4-12, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1074-8121 DOI 10.1108/10748121111107663
Online social networking: crises or cognitive surplus?
In this same context, adult educational discourses view with apprehension the internet-using
practices and preferences of today’s young people (Thurlow, 2006). Recent surveys report
that use of social network sites, for instance, is the dominant out-of-school, leisure-time
computer using activity among US adolescents of various ages, ethnicities, and income
levels (Rideout et al., 2010). A form of social media (Barnes, 2006), social network sites
(SNS) are web-enabled services that ‘‘allow individuals to (1) construct a public or
semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom
they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made
by others within the system’’ (boyd and Ellison, 2007, p. 1). They feature prominent personal
profiling, highlighting the connections between people and content (Cormode and
Krishnamurthy, 2008), and allow people to visualize, interact with, and activate existing
personal and professional networks, and to create connections with new ones unbounded
by geographic distance. Yet, popular media accounts largely characterize young people’s
practices with social media like Facebook as deficient or harmful to academic achievement
(Hamilton, 2009; Karpinski, 2009), as leading to declining standards of literacy (Bauerlein,
2009; Carr, 2008; Thurlow, 2006), and as a ‘‘threat to societal values’’ (Herring, 2007, p. 4).

On the other hand, outside education, a growing number of scholars and social
commentators argue we are witnessing a cognitive surplus (Gladwell, 2005; Shirky, 2010)
spurred by these very same forms of digital media and their attendant social practices – i.e.
people volunteering their time, interest, and ingenuity online to participate in news, politics,
business, fashion, government, etc. – and that this cognitive surplus can have societal
benefits and can change our very notions of ‘‘knowledge’’ and the means of knowledge
production (e.g. Wikipedia) (Giles, 2005).

For instance, observe the upstart teen bloggers, on the scene, in the campaign tent, or at the
run-way show, pushing their reviews and images to the public while newspaper and
magazine editors are still jockeying to feature those subjects in issues that will be published
days or months later (Wilson, 2009). In the news industry, viewer participation in the form of
online comments, independently produced videos, blog entries, and media-sharing options
are being harnessed to enhance the accuracy, power and spread of centrally produced
stories (e.g. CNN’s documentary Black in America) (Nelson, 2008). In politics, potential
voters don’t just consume campaign propaganda, but help to shape and distribute it via
blogs, home-grown videos, tweets and social network sites (Sheehy, 2008). Despite the
economic downturn, businesses seeking to tap their employees ‘‘social connections,
institutional memories and special skills – knowledge that large, geographically dispersed
companies often have a difficult time obtaining’’ are investing in social networking software
to connect the company’s employees into a single web forum (Stone, 2007, p. C2). In
fashion, once locked-down runway shows are now streamed live over the internet with some
companies providing viewers with the option to signal their likes or dislikes via Facebook and
immediately purchase items online, potentially disrupting traditional production cycles,
magazine editors’ influence, and industry definitions of fashion itself (Heyman, 2010). This
Fall, within the US government, when the Department of Education (DOE) wanted ‘‘to identify
and solve U.S. education’s most pressing classroom problems’’ it turned to public educators
as ‘‘creators of both educational processes and products, and as agents who must
organize, manage, and assume risks in solving problems,’’ as stated on its Challenge to
Innovate website (see http://challenge.gov/ED/60-challenge-to-innovate-c2i). Using a social
media space it accepted hundreds of problem submissions, and then invited public
educators to review, vote for, and comment on the problems posted. Some of the problems
identified were how can educators:
B Better incorporate students’ voices in decision making?
B Facilitate parental involvement?
B Help students develop the literacy skills to succeed?

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VOL. 19 NO. 1 2011 ON THE HORIZON PAGE 5
 From the public’s rankings of these problems, the US DOE will choose a select few to feature
as it again turns to public educators to contribute their solutions.
Publishing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Scearce et al. (2010), in studying trends
among non-profits, foundations and socially responsible businesses, argue that this
facilitation of human relationships and connections via social media has the potential to
garner significant organizational advantages, including:
B weaving community;
B encouraging greater openness and transparency;
B accelerating information-sharing;
B accessing more diverse perspectives;
B mobilizing people;
B stimulating collaborative knowledge-building; and ultimately
B reducing the cost of participation and coordination of resources and actions.
Disadvantages to facilitating relational practices via social media are that ‘‘half baked’’ ideas
are made public, and those trying to manage work flows and processes must tackle
concerns about brand and message control, privacy concerns, dealing with information
overload, learning the range of technology options, and leveraging the right social media for
one’s purposes (Scearce et al., 2010).

Two themes: social network sites and learning

How should we think about these broader trends in relation to thinking about learning,
teaching, and the incorporation of social media into education? To advance this
conversation, I now synthesize what the educational research currently says about
learning and social network sites, the aforementioned dominant form of social media used
by US young people. My goal is to inform educational leaders, apprehensive or cautiously
optimistic about young people’s media-using practices, who are asking:
1. What are youth’s purposes and practices with social network sites, and are they doing
anything of educational value?
2. How might these understandings help us to design for wider civic participation,
increasingly sophisticated interactions and accomplishments, and deal with potential
dangers?
3. How can existing social networking technologies and attendant practices be
appropriated and/or re-envisioned and re-worked to produce improvements in areas of
educational priority such as educational attainment, the development of science, math
and technology literacies, communication and twenty-first century skills, and preparation
for future work lives?
Below I share two insights related to these questions, generated from a review of the
educational literature (Greenhow et al., 2009a), from explorations of young people’s (ages
16-24) use of the social network sites MySpace and Facebook in situ (Greenhow and Robelia,
2009a, b; Greenhow and Burton, n.d.; Greenhow et al., 2009), and an ongoing investigation of
older adolescents’ use of an open source social networking application, implemented within
Facebook, and designed for informal science learning and civic action (Greenhow, n.d., 2010).
Moreover, I suggest how each theme might inform the design of technology-mediated spaces
for learning and questions we might ask in studying such spaces that would move us closer to
understanding these questions above. The studies on which these insights are based included
multiple sources of data gathered over the course of 2.5 years: surveys with high school
students (n ¼ 600) and college students (n ¼ 346); content analysis of their MySpace and
Facebook accounts; think-aloud protocols as students used their social network site; and focus
groups and interviews with purposeful samples of high, medium, and low users.

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Social network sites can serve as supports for and sites of learning
Young people use social network sites for a wide-range of purposes; they piggy-back on
existing online socializing routines to co-opt SNSs as social learning resources in direct and
indirect support of education-related tasks and values.
For example, the students we studied from low-income, urban families in the upper
Midwestern part of the USA perceived their MySpace as providing social support, relational
maintenance, and an outlet for self-expression and self-presentation (Greenhow and
Robelia, 2009a, b). Social support has long been identified as an ecological construct that
influences individual wellbeing (Schwarzer and Knoll, 2007) often as a buffer to stress, as
moderator of stress’s effects, or as direct emotional, psychological, cognitive or practical
aid. Students believed their support networks were actually stronger after prolonged
MySpace membership, citing various channels for communication and frequent personal
profile updating as helping them feel closer to, and maintain an awareness of, their close and
extended friends; they felt regular online social networking encouraged openness, sharing,
and getting to know more ‘‘sides’’ of a person. The majority of students profiled
demonstrated between 50 and 150 MySpace ‘‘friends’’ and possessed a nuanced
understanding of ‘‘friend’’ that included both intimate friends and family as well as
acquaintances, or new people they had just met.
Moreover, students used their online social network to fulfill social learning functions within
and across informal and formal learning spheres of activity. These social learning functions
included:
B obtaining validation and appreciation of creative work through feedback on their profile
pages;
B peer/alumni support – that is, reaching out to former classmates to give or receive help in
managing the ups and downs of high school or college life; and
B help with school-related tasks (Greenhow and Robelia, 2009a).
The latter took several forms: ‘‘chatting’’ online through MySpace to mitigate school-related
stress, asking questions about instructions or deadlines, planning study groups, requesting
educational resources from the network (e.g. ‘‘if they know a site that would help me with my
project, they’ll post it up and I can go see it’’), gathering project materials, brainstorming
ideas, sharing written work, and exchanging feedback. Interestingly, participants
envisioned using a social network site as part of their college transition strategy and felt
their regular use of their social network site was developing their creativity, communication
skills, technology skills, and openness to divergent viewpoints (Greenhow and Robelia,
2009b). Additional focused research is needed to determine the accuracy of these
perceptions across various groups of students.
Of course, it is not particularly surprising that young people would adapt the spaces they
frequent for their educational-related purposes, as school-related activities and concerns
dominate much of adolescent life. What is surprising is the presence of these behaviors and
beliefs even among the majority of our low income high school students, a group
understudied in the educational technology literature and presumably experiencing more
barriers to (but potentially more to gain from) participating in social network sites where such
social media are typically blocked in schools and public libraries (Greenhow et al., 2009).
Furthermore, where such informal sharing, peer validation and feedback, alumni support,
and spontaneous help with school-related tasks has typically occurred offline, pre-dating
the internet, these social processes, moved online into social network sites, can now be
archived and tracked with social graphing software. In theory, we should be able to begin to
identify what learning resources exactly are moving through the network, to and from whom,
and with what impacts over time (e.g. How is learning contagious?) (Christakis and Fowler,
2009). If educational curricula have typically been consumed with learning what (learning
science, math, social studies content) and with learning as becoming (learning to become a
scientist or historian by applying the tools and practices of the discipline), we can now also

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 focus deeper attention on understanding social learning: how people learn with whom, or
learn to be contributors to local and global society with what degree of influence (Brown,
2008; Brown and Duguid, 2002). Moreover, educational designers might think about how
some of the socio-technical features most utilized in naturally occurring, youth-initiated
social network sites, like MySpace (e.g. multimedia identity-posting capabilities, frequent
updating and sharing of microcontent, social search, linking users with content
contributions, annotation, ranking, recommendation systems) could be incorporated into
the personalized learning systems touted in the new US National Educational Technology
Plan (United States Department of Education, 2010).

Online social networking can stimulate social and civic benefits, online and offline, which can
have implications for education
For instance, ‘‘social capital’’ refers to resources or benefits available to people through their
social interactions (Lin, 1999) and is valuable to feelings of trust, reciprocity and social
cohesion (Putnam, 2000); it emphasizes the importance of developing a network, in that it
comprises:
B resources embedded in the social structure;
B accessibility to such resources; and
B mobilization of such resources by individuals in purposeful actions (Lin, 1999, p. 35).
Thus, investment in social networks may benefit individuals through greater access to and
use of information, influence, social credentials, and reinforcement of identity and
recognition (Lin, 1999, p. 31). Research in education and human development has typically
focused on two broad types of social capital among youth and families (rather than among
peer networks):
1. bridging capital, derived from weak ties that afford us diverse perspectives and new
information; and
2. bonding capital, derived from strong ties that come from close friends and family and
afford us that shoulder to cry on (Putnam, 2000).
Most importantly, the presence of social capital in one’s social networks has been linked to a
number of educational outcomes, including educational achievement, educational
attainment, and other academic and psychosocial outcomes (Dika and Singh, 2002). In
other words, learners tend to do better and persist in educational settings when they feel a
strong sense of social belonging and connectedness.
Interestingly, in studying predominantly white, middle-class, college students’ use of
Facebook (n ¼ 286), Ellison et al. (2007) found that intensive use of Facebook was
associated with higher levels of bridging capital, and to a lesser extent, bonding capital and
maintained social capital, a concept the researchers developed to describe the ability to
‘‘mobilize resources from a previously inhabited network, such as ones high school’’ (Ellison
et al., 2007, p. 25). They suggested that networking through these sites may help to
crystallize relationships that might otherwise remain ephemeral, encouraging users to
strengthen latent ties and maintain connections with former friends, thus allowing people to
stay connected as they move from one offline community to another. They also found that
college students with lower self-esteem gained more from their use of Facebook in terms of
bridging social capital than the higher self-esteem respondents (Steinfield et al., 2008). They
concluded that Facebook affordances may help reduce barriers some college students
experience in forming the kinds of large, diverse networks that are sources of bridging
capital.
Replicating this study with high school students from low income families (n ¼ 607), a group
most at risk for lower levels of educational attainment, achievement, and dropping out, we
have found positive associations between these students’ use of the social network site,
MySpace, and both bonding and bridging social capital. Moreover, qualitative data help to
illuminate our survey findings and pinpoint the opportunities or barriers for forging and

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sustaining relationships through online social network sites. Interestingly, students we
interviewed positively identified Myspace and Facebook as part of their learning and college
transition strategy (Greenhow and Burton, n.d.; Greenhow and Robelia, 2009a, b). Although
this particular exploration occurred only over the course of a spring semester, more
longitudinal analysis and tracking of learners as they move through high school and into
college settings while continuing participation in their online social networks, may help us
better understand these phenomena as supports for learning processes and educational
outcomes we value.
Moreover, in our research on young people’s use of an social networking application called
‘‘Hot Dish’’ – implemented within Facebook, the world’s largest social network site – we
found that through the design of the application we were able to tie users’ online social
activities to offline civic behavior (Greenhow, 2010; Greenhow, n.d.). For instance, Hot Dish
is an open-source social networking application that facilitates information-sharing about
environmental science issues, commentary and debate, and the completion of challenges
designed to engage users in pro-environmental behavior around climate change. Located
as a tab within one’s existing Facebook profile, key features included the ability to post
original story entries; share articles from online sources; browse or read articles deeply;
curate, rank and comment on posted entries; craft a personal profile; showcase users’
statistics and contributions; and participate in Action Team challenges, or activities both
online and offline (e.g. writing a letter to the editor, signing an online petition, volunteering for
an environmental organization, recycling, starting a local recycling program, engaging in
green consumerism) which were showcased within the Hot Dish environment after members
documented their completion of them. Similar to gaming environments, users earned points
for completing offline challenges and these accumulating point totals were featured
prominently in the online environment so that individuals got recognized for changes in
offline behavior (environmental activism) and, as role models, stimulated others in the online
environment to make changes. Could similar data-tracking and representational features be
built into future educational context to foster preferred learning (and teaching) behaviors,
role modeling, civic engagement and spread of practices we value not just in education but
as members of a participatory democracy? This is just one interesting avenue for future
research.
To further our understanding of the social and civic benefits briefly mentioned above, the
field of education and information studies needs an accumulation of research and evaluation
concerned with students’ personal social networks and the interrelationships between online
and offline, which have hitherto be under-explored in the social capital in education literature
in its focus on parent-child, parent-teacher, or teacher-child face-to-face networks (Dika and
Singh, 2002). Similar to studies of parents’ personal social networks (Cochran and Walker,
2005) in family social science, we require additional research into learners’ network
formation and factors that influence social network membership across the learning ecology
young people currently inhabit, not merely within the formal classroom. We also require
further understanding of network engagement and the importance of personal initiatives
(e.g. a student’s personality, interest, a life event, developmental phase) that can operate
independently on the degree to which students have helpful, collaborative, and satisfying
network relationships (high engagement) (Walker and Greenhow, 2010). Finally, we need to
better understand the social processes of network influence and the specific benefits
available to learners or accruing in online social networks. For instance, how do offers of
practical, just-in-time assistance, information, emotional or psychological aid, modeling,
coaching, etc. influence learning over time?
Although popular media accounts have portrayed the internet – and its youth-initiated
spaces such as social network sites – as distractions at best, and harmful at worst, these
exploratory studies suggest alternative views; students’ practices within these spaces,
although not without potential negative consequences, may also have positive implications
for learning, educational attainment, and youth development, helping young people develop
social supports for school, caring and capital-enhancing social connections, and
meaningful participation in civic life.

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Corresponding author
Christine Greenhow is an Assistant Professor of learning sciences and technology in the
College of Education and the College of Information Studies (joint appointment) at the
University of Maryland. She studies literacies broadly within online social network sites and
the design of social networking applications for educational purposes. Christine Greenhow
can be contacted at: greenhow@umd.edu

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