Given the current high adoption of social media within and outside of academia scholarship, openness blurs the lines between, for example, those who are in academic field and those who are not and made “a shift from traditional authority to an epistemology of shared knowledge and expertise (Mills, 2010, p. 254). This makes educational researchers also think about many issues and the need for change. For example, before social media emerged, knowledge discovered or generated from educational researchers was shared and evaluated only within their leagues. However, as noted in Greenhow and Gleason (2014), the affordance of social media has made it possible to explicitly share it with a non-specialist audience, which allows in-service teachers to explore the research of educators and to use the practical knowledge they have built up. This means that the research can be evaluated. This openness breaks down the literacy prevailing among educators and creates an environment in which other groups or individuals, such as teachers, can be involved in shaping literacies and discourses. Therefore, in the modern society, people who build their walls are no longer prosperous, but how well they utilize “social scholarship values and social media affordance (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014)” to create collective intelligence is important.
I appreciate your point about the affordance of social media which enables sharing research findings with non-specialist audience and leading to changes in practices of teachers. However, do you think the degree of interaction between these two groups (researchers and educators) is enough? In my opinion, if a researcher does not personally make an effort to share the findings with non-researchers, implications for practice part in the research article will probably be read by only researchers. As I observe on social media, there are some researchers who are active on social media and sharing informative posts for educators and parents and answering their questions. Do you know any platforms or social media in which researchers, educators, and parents come together and share their knowledge and experiences?
This is such a great point, Jeong. A lot of conducted research ends up lost from the lay audience just because not everyone has the same vocabulary to engage with these ideas, but social media made knowledge more accessible for everyone. This also makes me think that perhaps researchers today are held more accountable by the audience outside of their academic silos, and therefore there is a higher push for more in-depth and more application-based research, things that can benefit a wider community than just those in academia.
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