Education and Social Media: Research Directions to Guide a Growing Field

Social media play an increasing role in our everyday lives and in education. Teachers and administrators may use social media for professional learning, to find materials for use in the classroom, and as a vehicle for engaging students with each other or with the world at large. As this body of scholarship continues to grow, now is the time to reflect on where the field might go from here to conduct the most impactful scholarship on education and social media. Accordingly, this chapter proposes research directions and approaches that promise to advance this expanding field, grounded in insights from the long history of studying technology in education, including over a decade of research on social media. We summarize insights from reviews of the existing research literature on learning and teaching with social media in education. Next, we apply a typology of the kind of studies needed to advance the field of education and educational technology as a useful lens for assessing prior work, identifying gaps in the knowledge base, and envisioning potential research directions. The chapter argues that new scholarly work is needed into three main areas: (1) research focus, or the subjects or topics of research that are needed; (2) methodological work, or new or underutilized approaches to studying education and social media; and (3) conceptual work, or theorization or framing of studies in education and beyond. We provide specifics in each of these areas in the final section.