How useful do you find the open source tools and social media for learning? Is it your personal preference that drives this or the affordances? Would they be useful for others if you find it lacking? What would make them more useful?
Social networking is constantly used to enhance engagement in classrooms or online courses. Its use changes from integrating social exercises within existing online lessons to a completely synergistic methodology for teaching and learning by affording the participant the opportunity for full and active inclusion. This type of learning may be evidenced in Formal Structured Learning (FSL), Personal Directed Learning (PDL), or Group Directed Learning (GDL).
Benefits of such learning pedagogies are found in the option of open source tools to acquire various social media software for implementation. Not at all like paid programming, open source programming, permits the client access to the source code and are accordingly equipped to change it as stated by your needs.
In spite of the fact that open source programming is allowed for free download, clients are liable to licenses, which give licensees the right to duplicate, alter and redistribute source code, yet might additionally force a few commitments on them, for instance alterations to the code that are appropriated must be made accessible in source code structure.
Users of social media are often criticized for the lack of structure and at times accused of wasting time. Many studies show, individuals are accessing it on their own mobile devices. Why not harness this and use it in our classrooms, physical and virtual? Clark Quinn (2010) refers to this as taking a “social media cigarette break”, where employees often have to leave the building in order to connect with their personal and professional networks.
Building collaborative library of course links or other resources, such as done in SearchTeam allows classmates to easily work in collaborative groups without physically meeting on a consistent basis. Other uses of social media for learning may include:
- Blogging (WordPress)
- Podcasting (Audacity)
- RSS readers (Google Reader)
- Micro-sharing services (Twitter)
- Photo sharing (Instagram)
- Presentation sharing (Slideshare)
- Screencast sharing (Skype)
- Video Sharing (YouTube)
- Social Bookmarking (Reddit)
- Collaborative calendaring (Google Calendar)
- Collaborative documents (Google Docs)
- Collaborative workspaces (Google Docs)
One fallacy of using social media as a tool for learning is that it may provide a controlled environment with a particular confine of a particular software, I retort, control is a myth. For example, controlling what conversations people have or what they say on the phone or in emails is impossible. Similarly, one can’t control what happens in social media. Having said that, online networking really furnishes associations with more perceivability about what is, no doubt said, and likewise gives the chance to address any mistaken informing. Compare Wikipedia where different clients balance erroneous data rapidly. The need to be in control, be that as it may, is a profound authoritative issue.
As opposed to utilizing stand-alone instruments to give social networking practicality, an equivalent alternative is to introduce a coordinated effort suite or stage, which coordinates various key social advances like wikis, websites, RSS channels, social bookmarking and record imparting and additionally client profiling, in one spot inside the association. In spite of the fact that the practicality of each of the distinct segments of a collaboration platform may not frequently be as advanced as committed, stand-alone items, it does give different preferences.
My personal preference is a combination, or blended, platform of open source social medial learning. The primary factoid in teaching is conveying a message. A learner must correctly receive said message in order for positive learning outcomes to be achieved. In our class, I feel we have successfully illustrated this method by combining a mixture of face-to-face meetings with the utilization of an open source CMS and blogging tools. The weeks that were strictly asynchronous were much more mottled when it was time for receiving the message. It was discombobulated and lacked continuity. The lack of emotion in typed text is often hard to understand.
With that being said, using these tools for message dissemination is a great opportunity for the learning community.
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