Learning and Social Media: Designing Applications for Education

Dr. Christine Greenhow’s research focuses on learning in social media contexts and the design of networked spaces, such as social network sites and open-source social networking applications, from learning sciences, new literacy studies, and learning technologies perspectives, with the goal of improving theory, practice, and policy. In this presentation, she will discuss recent educational research about how people learn with social media with the goal of surfacing current debates and controversies. She will also share two projects focused on the design of Facebook applications for learning purposes. Possible directions for future research and design work will be discussed.

About Christine

Dr. Christine Greenhow is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University. Formerly, she was an assistant professor in the College of Education and the School of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She completed postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Studies and College of Education, where she won the university’s Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award for extraordinary scholarly achievement. From 2009 to 2010, she was a visiting fellow in the Information Society Project at Yale University, and she is currently working on a book about education and social media. Christine earned her doctorate from Harvard University, where she was a Larson Fellow.  She and collaborators Nicole Ellison and Bernie Hogan received funding from the Gates Foundation to study and develop an educational Facebook app, and she was the PI on the “Youth and Social Media” research project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Christine was founding chair of the Social Networks Research Collaborative, an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Minnesota. Her work has been featured in local, national, and international news media. She has been active in national educational reform and policy efforts and is the co-founder of an award-winning educational non-profit.

Christine Greenhow, assistant professor at Michigan State University College of Education will speak as part of "In the Loop", a lecture series on design, innovation and entrepreneurship organized by IIT Institute of Design faculty. The series engages a wide range of speakers that present on topics ranging from theoretical research and emerging methodologies that are relevant to the field of design as well as personal narratives and examples from current design practice.