The Social Media and its impact on Education

Can you recognize any of the icons in the photo below?

(Photo from http://graphic-design-portfolios.com/)

The icons above are just few of the icons that, in general is called “SOCIAL MEDIA” icons.

Social media is a tool you use to share content and information online. With the development of computer technology, social media is now enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques. It has substantially changed the way companies, communities, schools and individuals communicate.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media:
- Collaborative projects (Wikipedia)
- Blogs and microblogs (Twitter)
- Content communities (YouTube)
- Social networking sites (Facebook)
- Virtual game worlds (World of Warcraft)
- Virtual social worlds (Second Life)

Social media is something that has become widely accepted in our culture, you could actually see everything from large companies to community groups having their own Facebook accounts, and children learning ABCs and phonics on YouTube from their parent's ipad.

Here’s an interesting video (a little bit fast thought) showing and explaining what a Social Media is and its revolution.

But there are statistics showing that social media has become a serious distraction from student’s academic performance. I believe though that if students are going to be distracted by the social media, they might as well be learning valuable information while they’re at it.

Social media has made it possible for people to explore different variety of information online. Starting with the sites such as YouTube, people have become more interested to learn things online and self-educate rather than seeking assistance from some other means.

I am for one is a regular user of social media – Facebook, Twitter, You tube, Bing, Google +, etc . I find Facebook as a place not only for sharing my latest updates and photos to my family and friends back home, but also a place of academic and professional learning and development. By subscribing (or liking) to some pages like National Geographic, Bloomberg/Yahoo news , Cooking pages and Parenting pages, I am getting bulk of useful information on demand and what more – for free.

So I must agree that Social media like Facebook provides 21st-century learning opportunities for every one of us. I wish students could grab this opportunity too.

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