A social media platform in higher education

Abstract—This paper reports on the successful use of Graasp, a social media platform, by university students for their collaborative work. Graasp features a number of innovations, such as administrator-free creation of collaborative spaces, a context-aware recommendation and privacy management. In the context of a EU-funded project involving large test beds, we have been able to extend this platform with lightweight tools (widgets) aimed for learning and competence development and to validate its usefulness in a collaborative learning context. Keywords-collaborative learning; social media; competence development; education; context‑awareness; widgets; opensocial I