Mining Memories: Designing a Platform to Support Social Media Based Writing

Many teens struggle with school writing and particularly in identifying personally relevant topics, which motivate writing improvement. However, a wealth of potential topics is available through their social media data. We explore the design of Sparkfolio, a prewriting support tool that aims to help students successfully prepare meaningful writing topics from their own social media content. This web delivered tool was evaluated with 46 teen users in the context of their high school English class. Findings demonstrate that the use of social media can enhance the quality of written outcomes, as Sparkfolio users had significantly greater gains than a control group.