This research studies how people use social media tools (e.g. blogs, wikis, electronic social networks) to work together more effectively to advance individual, group, organization, and community objectives. Despite high-profile success stories, we actually know very little about how best to use social media to enable effective collaboration among individuals or within organizations. The mere adoption of these tools by individuals or organizations is unlikely to have the desired effect unless people know how to use these tools to enable more effective collaborative processes. This research will employ qualitative content analysis to provide a rich picture of social media collaboration, conduct quantitative analysis on large-scale datasets to identify macro-level trends, and develop computer simulations to predict how social media might affect organizations in ways not yet observed. The educational activities of this proposal will focus on how to employ social media in the classroom to improve educational processes. I plan to introduce five different social media enabled innovations -crowdsourcing exams, wiki-based peer review, in-class blogosphere, video podcasting lectures, and in-class electronic social networks - and empirically test the effects of these innovations on classroom outcomes.
The broader impact of this research is to better understand how social media tools can be used to improve processes in a wide range of organizations and settings. These tools have been shown to have important economic, political, societal, and educational impacts. Regardless of whether particular social media tools endure in coming years, the technological features and collaborative capabilities they represent will continue to persist and evolve.
