Using a Social Media Platform to Explore How Social Media Can Enhance Primary and Secondary Learning

The growing set of Social Media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Docs has the potential to enhance primary and secondary learning. To collect and evaluate suggestions for novel applications of social media to learning from online participants, we created a version of our Collective Discovery Engine. Over 155, educators, engineers, and social scientists responded to our emailed invitations to participate. In this paper we summarize the experiment, the data collected, and the responses. Suggestions were broadly classified into three categories: collaboration, diversity, and evaluation. We report on demographic correlations and present the suggestions that participants collectively considered most valuable (effective and/or novel). The interface is available online at: http://opinion.berkeley.edu/learning