I came across this interesting article by Erik Andersson & Johan Öhman. 

In their work they argue that 'little research has so far been conducted on digitally mediated conversations and their educational potential. In our study we have shown that young people’s conversation in an online community can be important for learning about and taking a stand on environmental and sustainability issues. We have also shown that such conversations can be sophisticated, elaborative, create an educational situation in which facts about the world, morals and political values and interests are discussed and argued'.

Raising the issues of online communities in EE an interesting topic in which we are all invested ... as we are all members of this on line community!

Young people’s conversations about environmental and sustainability issues in social media and their educational implications are under-researched. Understanding young people’s meaning-making in social media and the experiences they acquire could help teachers to stage pluralistic and participatory approaches to classroom discussions about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the article is to explore the characteristics of meaning-making in young people’s conversations about environmental and sustainability issue in social media, more precisely in an online community. The study takes a public pedagogy and citizenship-as-practice approach and uses Epistemological Move Analysis. The conversation are shown to be argumentative, sophisticated, elaborative and competitive and create an educational situation in which facts about the world and moral and political values and interests are confronted and argued. The findings raise questions about pluralistic and participatory approaches and the staging of classroom conversations in environmental and sustainability education.