Social media and education … now the dust has settled

In 2009 we commissioned a special issue of Learning, Media & Technology to explore the issues surrounding education and social media ( … or ‘social software’ as it fleetingly was being referred to at the time). The original call for papers challenged authors to provide empirical perspectives on the emerging ‘messy realities’ of social media, learning and education. The resulting issue of the journal (34, 2) contained some the first detailed accounts of the social, cultural and political dimensions of this ‘new wave’ of digital media use in education.