Let’s face the facts, the days of searching for information in an encyclopedia are long gone. To be completely honest, I firmly believe if you were to give a teenager an assignment to locate information in an encyclopedia they wouldn’t even know how to do it.
Computers and the internet have completely changed the way we look for information and social media is going to play an even larger role when it comes to education shortly.
With the world tweeting, Digging, Tumbling, and writing on walls, it’s only a matter of time before a high school teacher or college professor decides to add his/her Twitter address on their syllabus so the students can get a hold of them (that is if they don’t want emails to flood their inbox), creates a class forum for required discussion sessions (which is already happening with Springboard), or gives live video review sessions via Justin.tv or Ustream.
That’s not all, think about how easily students can obtain information using Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.
I’ll give you a scenario:
You are given an assignment to write a five page paper on the Cuban Missile Crisis. A simple search for “Cuban Missile Crisis” on Digg brings back 129 results, 38 results on Reddit, and 73 results on Technorati.
By spending less than two minutes online you have 240 possible sources you can browse through for your paper. Had you gone to the library, you would have found five or six possible sources and it would have taken you anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to locate the information you wanted to use.
Colleges and Universities are taking advantage of the benefits of social media to keep students and faculty informed on campus activities and important news updates.
Alumni associations are utilizing Facebook to keep high school and college alumni up to date with reunions, news, and photos of their past classmates.
All this is just the beginning of an era. Social media has already influenced millions of people and although a lot of people are still learning about Twitter and Facebook, social media’s potential influence on education can make learning fun again.
As always, your thoughts/comments/linkbacks are always appreciated.
Test Blog.
Tags: College, Digg, Education, Facebook, High School, Internet, Reddit, Social Media, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Universities
lol most of the comments many people post make me giggle, repeatedly i think about if they truly read the writing and reports before placing a comment or if perhaps they mearly skim the title of the blog post and prepare the initial thought that drifts into their minds. anyway, it is really enjoyable to browse clever commentary every now and then as opposed to the identical, outdated post vomit that i generally observe on the internet
A good sight on this you have, whereas I don’t go along with almost everything which was explained I can see your case.
Hey, this blog is really happening! It took me quite a while to read through all the comments. I appreciate the idea of tweeting the post so that more people could find it!
Thank you for your wonderful post. Very informative and I enjoyed reading it along with your other articles. Thanks for sharing and continue the great work.
P thanks to your ideas , i’d adore to adhere to your weblog as usually as i can.possess a good day
Your blog is so informative ¡ keep up the good work!!!!
Your blog its amazing thx a lot !
lol ok so here’s precisely how brainless I am, halfway through looking through your post I dropped my mouse and shut the site in error and I couldn’t locate your site once again right up until 5 days later to finish reading through from the point i stopped at simply because I didn’t remember how I linked to your site in the first place ahaha in any case it was worth the wait..kudos
Good article on your site, too.