Building Relatedness Through Hashtags: Social Influence and Motivation Within Social Media-Based Online Discussion Forums = Building Relatedness Through Hashtags: Social Influence and Motivation Within Social Media-Based Online Discussion Forums

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the last two decades, the mainstream growth of the Internet has led to transformative change in education, particularly higher education, as the Internet has provided new opportunities for learning online and at a distance (Allen & Seaman, 2010, Shea & Bidjerano, 2010). Commensurate with this has been a rise in the sphere of online activity known as social media - networks of users tied together via Web 2.0-based applications that offer users an opportunity to generate and share content of their own (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). A recent development in the world of social media is the introduction of so-called "hashtags," represented symbolically by the "#" or "pound sign" symbol, joining use together, even if they don``t know each other (Ebner, Beham, Costa, & Reinhardt, 2009, Page, 2012). Easy to create, hashtags have become a unique way to experience global events, have political debates, or meet people with similar interests. For some time, online discussion forums have been a preferred pedagogical method of generating and facilitating discussion in online education and classrooms with online components (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003, Rossman, 1999). Online discussion forums are typically administered through the built-in tools of a Learning Management System (LMS). Although LMSs offer basic tools for class instruction and management, there is debate as to the limits of their pedagogical value (Hong, 2008, Martindale & Wiley, 2004). The pedagogical concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) challenges the dominance of LMS usage in online courses, bringing a student-centered and bottom-up perspective to online education. The thinking behind PLEs is that instruction should be situated in an environment more congruent with the learners`` typical technology usage for their personal lives, such as social media (Attwell, 2007). The purpose of this presentation is to share the research results of a study investigating the motivation of student``s participation in an online discussion forum when moved from an LMS to a class Twitter hashtag group. Twitter activity was analyzed, and respondents were surveyed on their intrinsic motivation in online discussions, social influences on their social media choice, and if their previous experience with social media affected motivation.