What Can We Learn from Facebook Activity? Using Social Learning Analytics to Observe New Media Literacy Skills June Ahn University of Maryland, College Park College of Information Studies and College of Education 2117J Hornbake Building, South Wing, College Park, MD, USA
[email protected] st ABSTRACT 21 century skills is not new, but the nature of these skills is Social media platforms such as Facebook are now a ubiquitous profoundly different in media-rich environments. For example, part of everyday life for many people. New media scholars posit collaboration is an enduring human skill, but individuals must that the participatory culture encouraged by social media gives now be able to collaborate in environments that are mediated by rise to new forms of literacy skills that are vital to learning. technology, across distances, with mass numbers of users, and However, there have been few attempts to use analytics to with easy access to information. understand the new media literacy skills that may be embedded in Literacy scholars also contribute to this dialogue by elaborating an individual’s participation in social media. In this paper, I particular skills that are important when individuals interact with collect raw activity data that was shared by an exploratory sample new media. For example, Jenkins [19] observes that the rise of of Facebook users. I then utilize factor analysis and regression online communities such as Facebook facilitates a participatory models to show how (a) Facebook members’ online activity culture where individuals must develop literacies such as coalesce into distinct categories of social media behavior and (b) networking, information appropriation, remix, judgment, and how these participatory behaviors correlate with and predict collective intelligence.