Post-Bloom Social Media Taxonomy

Description

Employing social media in a classroom can be considered an effective way to enhance learners' motivation, and to promote inclusive learning by providing students with more varied learning pathways. Integrating social media in a proactive manner to enhance the learning experience can have a positive impact on a range of subjects including history, medicine, and science. However, this process requires a good understanding of the ways in which social media can be used and a way to gauge the extent of student engagement and depth of learning through social media. With a view to supporting this aim, I developed a social media taxonomy, which identifies specific ways in which the potential of social media can be harnessed in an increasingly digital society.
The purpose of the social media taxonomy is to explore how a standardized mechanism can be used to familiarize educators with methods to activate social media platforms effectively as a learning tool; to help them understand how the platforms can be employed in the subjects they teach; and to unify social media resources with both a physical and a virtual learning environment. The focus of the taxonomy is the metacognitive process that forms the following three dimensions “3Cs”; and categories: Consciousness (Viewing), Cognitive (Posting, Interacting, and Analyzing), and Creativity (Evaluating and Curating) These denote a hierarchical structure where progression is based on the ability acquired through the accomplishment of the previous category and dimension. Learning is designed to help students integrate new learning experiences based on prior knowledge. Accordingly, educators will encourage higher-order thinking in students by improving their metacognitive processes.
The taxonomy represents an empirically grounded theory of social media use in pedagogy, and therefore has considerable potential for improving practice. However, for this potential to be realized, the knowledge captured in the taxonomy must be mobilized for use and communicated in a form by which lecturers can apply the taxonomy to develop pedagogy in their own contexts. While the literature review focus on the impact of using social media on the learning process, the use of social media as a learning tool through the present research take a different approach and focuses on employing social media platforms effectively as a learning tool in the subjects taught. Herein, social media can only be employed as an appropriate tool in the learning landscape if it complies with instructional objectives and has been designed to consider the learning experience. Hence, this research paper is designed to create a bridge between research and practice by transferring a suitable subject’s content activities through the social media taxonomy to one of the proper social media platforms.
The Social Media Taxonomy is expected to accelerate the transition from Web 1.0, where learners search and read information with little interaction, to Web 2.0, which provides a more vibrant and interactive learning environment. The taxonomy will also provide a wide range of opportunities for students to acquire a degree of readiness before participating in the learning process, to play a dynamic role in shaping the learning content, and to develop a perspective to achieve individualized outcomes. In addition, it could help educators analyse the learning steps in the taxonomy to uncover critical points of curriculum alignment and overlooked learning opportunities. This would enable them to establish a set of preliminary guidelines on where and how to improve relevant content and methods for more effective delivery of instruction to increase student engagement.

Period	13 Apr 2023
Event title	23rd Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2023)
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International