Does Social Media help education?
Before registering for this course I was of the view that social media is just for social interactions, people emailing and writing each other but that was a myopic assumption or should I say that the social media have improved over the years to accommodate education and learning both synchronous and asynchronous learning environment. The social media have come to include a lot of new Web 2.0 tools in recent years. Bates and Sangra (2011) included tools such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikis, Blogs, and Twitter (currently been used in OMDE 603 course. Most of these applications are used to share information in academic or social forum. In its early inception, Facebook tend to have attracted a negative outlook but recently some educational institution at all levels have begun using Facebook as a medium of academic as well as project-based learning medium.
With particular interest in Twitter as a learning tool, it has attracted a large number of users who use it as a discussion forum allowing learners to test, question and construct their own, personalized knowledge (2011). Students and instructors in tertiary institutions now use it to their advantage. Within this social-academic media environment instructors have a role to control and manage online, asynchronous discussion forum and limit access to students who are registered in a particular course or program. It is not so in a social software where the end user decides what and how to use the tool.
The question is, “Does Social Media help education?” The old reputation of social networks and media have been changing to include a human face and educational importance, and many educational institutions have absolved the benefits of using social media tools like Twitter, blogs and wikis for learning and interactive purposes. The UMUC has used these tools for a number of years now, and students and instructors have reacted well with these tools.
Bates, A. W., & Sangra, A. (2011). Managing technology in higher education. Strategies for
Transforming teaching and learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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