Expert Searching – Social Media

Due to the nature of social media, I will limit my discussion of using it as tool for expert searching to just a couple searches per platform. The two social media platforms I will be using are Twitter and Pinterest. I have also decided to limit my search to basic terminology often used around inquiry learning. I will research some of the following terms, with and without double quotation marks were possible:

• Inquiry learning
• Inquiry learning + Primary Students

Twitter:
I was surprised at the quality of results returned when searching Twitter. Numerous results were returned that included:

• New stories
• Papers
• Thoughts – both complaints and revelations

I found the following results to be particularly interesting:

Editing the search to include double quotation marks did not appear to change the search results. However, the addition of a # and removing the space, turning the search into #inquirylearning, yielded far more results. The use of hashtags appear to allow users to associate their posts with other like posts, thus making it considerably easy to locate information.

Although few results were academic, it was certainly interesting to discover how popular inquiry learning was throughout different countries, and to read people’s opinions on whether or not it is the way of the future.

Pinterest:
Pinterest is a great tool for collecting and presenting information. After a quick initial search, I discovered that Pinterest had already set up selection tools to allow me to add different search topics.

I found the results returned to be relevant to my searches, however I noticed that the academic quality of the results were lacking. These results were more orientated towards quick ideas, DIYs, and posters. Nonetheless, it was still interesting to trawl through the information provided, and see different opinions on how to incorporate inquiry learning into the classroom.