When face-to-face fails: Opportunities for social media to foster collaborative learning

Productive collaboration is an integral component of socially constructed perspectives of learning. Yet effective collaboration is quite challenging and not without its own risks. Collaboration, both distributed and face-to-face, must be nurtured; technologies can support or undermine its positive growth in learning communities. We present an exploratory investigation of the types of social interactions that are both productive and non-productive in face-to-face informal science learning contexts. We include an analysis of the ways in which social media technologies can be designed to support more collaborative interactions.