Educational Networking: A Glimpse at Emergent Field

Abstract

As a sample of the evolution that characterizes twenty-first century education, diverse Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning (TETL) approaches emerge, where educational networking (EN) is relevant. In this context, Web 2.0 represents a suitable environment to foster the creation, usage, and growth of online social networks (OSNs) that enable users to meaningfully connect, create, contribute, and collaborate in pursuit of common affairs, such as education. Hence, EN represents more than a platform for advertisement, breaking news, message dissemination, and content sharing, as it merges OSN functionalities with learning resources and its tools suitable for online teaching to instill social learning for all. Although EN is an incipient field in vigorous progress, it represents a new fashion of e-learning settings that gregariously transforms and spreads education worldwide. This is why a review of the evolution of EN labor and recent achievements leads to appreciate its nature, development, impact, and trends to consider its exploitation as part of an extended and novel academic offer. Thus, in this chapter a sample of works published since 2015 up to date is analyzed to shape a landscape of the endeavors performed in the EN arena. Therefore, a taxonomy for EN is designed to report a summary of the EN labor, whose features are outlined through a pattern to depict EN applications. The work reveals that most of the publications study how OSNs affect students’ learning, attitudes, and behavior, and general-purpose OSNs represent the most demanded platforms to foster EN.