In the CiteLearn project, funded by Wikicred, we are developing a tool to support people in learning a key skill of verifiability, to support the writing and flow of credible information.
A long line of research has explored the ways in which technologies can be used to support people in effective deliberation, dialogue, and mapping out of arguments in order to reason more effectively together.
Learning is a fundamentally social process. We know that certain kinds of dialogue support learning. Technologies have the potential to foster this dialogue, helping people to make their reasoning explicit, engage with each other, and engage in dialogic (or many voiced) learning.
Social media platforms of various kinds are used across communities to keep in touch, and share experiences and information. However, social media environments also mediate communities' interactions with each other, and with this information.
A body of work focuses on how we understand technologies to share and build our knowledge together through platforms like Wikipedia.
This work recognises that platforms mediate our interaction with knowledge, in particular communities (such as those who edit Wikipedia, and the range of communities who read - and have views on - its content).
Led by Amelia Johns (at UTS) the ARC Discovery project, Fostering Global Digital Citizenship: Diasporic Youth in a Connected World, aims to understand how young Australians think about and express their digital citizenship in secondary school classes and in their everyday digital and social media use.