Building Collaborative International Learning Experiences using Social Networking Services Betul Czerkawski and Max Lieberman The University of Arizona United States betul_ozkan@hotmail.com maxl@email.arizona.edu Abstract: Social networking services offer a multitude of collaborative learning opportunities for higher education students and faculty. While course management systems are still the main vehicle for online course delivery, new online learning environments draw increasingly on the design of social networks. The prominence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the availability of new online learning environments that focus on user participation and collaboration are indications of this shift. This paper discusses a new social networking service for higher education, iversity, and assesses the effectiveness of this service in creating a collaborative, international teaching and learning environment. Introduction Social networking services allow users to communicate on the basis of shared relationships and common interests. While the nature of this communication varies according to the culture and affordances of the service, universal features include personal profiles, lists of confirmed “friends,” and tools to share content and communicate with fellow users (Boyd & Ellison, 2007) . Currently popular social networking sites include Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. In education, social networks have both advocates (Yuen & Yuen, 2008; Franklin & Harmelen, 2007) and critics. In a recent blog post, Siemens (2011) declares that social networking services are effective for purposes including distributing “rapidly evolving information” and “staying connected with others on [sic] similar interests,” but that they are “terrible when people try to make [them] do more” (para.8): The substance needs to exist somewhere else (an academic profile, journal articles, blogs, online courses)... (para. 8) [S]cience and discovery require deep thought, time, and focus. The enormous and complex problems faced by different societies around the world will not be solved by twitter [sic], G+, or social media (para. 9). Even if taken at face value, Siemens’ statements do not discredit the potential of social networking services for educational purposes. For example, Hung and Yuen (2010) identify benefits tangential to course content in their students’ use of the social networking service Ning to supplement traditional classroom instruction: [A]s a social networking tool, Ning was found useful for strengthening students’ emotional connectedness with community members and facilitating the development of classroom communities with evidence of the participants’ enhanced engagement and mutual support for each other in their classroom CoP [community of practice] (p. 711). While the finding that a social venue has primarily social effects may not be surprising, this study demonstrates that social platforms need not detract from the “substance” with which Siemens is concerned (2011). Hung and Yuen (2010) acknowledge the need for further research that addresses the content- and knowledge-sharing affordances of social networking services. Additional research is also needed on the increasing number of online learning environments that integrate social features beyond the forums and direct messages of more traditional course management systems such as Desire2Learn, Blackboard, or Moodle. This paper discusses these gaps in the literature by examining how higher education students (both undergraduate and graduate) in international settings use one such social online learning environment to collaborate. - 2022 -