Skip to main content

Social Media as a learning tool

Probably one of the reason the discussion about social media as a learning tool is important is because of the popularity of Social Media. The popularity is more in terms of participation of the number of people of all age groups and their active participation. It would be wonderful to have this platform used as a media for learning.

Path for Social Media as a learning Tool.
  1. Platform for Communication
  2. Allows for active participation (in sense of user generated data; noisy data)
  3. Generally all are equal (peer communication) but
  4. Some emerge as leaders (may be based on their expertise, participation, creativity ....)
  5. SIG formed (Leaders moderate the group)
  6. Leads to some focused discussion (signs of learning - though not formal)
  7. since there is less noise "useful learning can happen"

So structurally everything is in place to enable learning if no distinction is made between formal and informal learning! but with some constraints on the social media ... like a teacher the leader moderates - what to do when and why and structures information) ... in this structure SM and a ICT learning tool can be stitched together.

However, the constraints reduce the social media as a learning tool to a mere classroom (CR) kind of environment. At best one could call this social media learning tool as CR++.

Having established that one is looking at a CR++ environment; the question is should CR++ be in addition to or in its own right the only platform for learning?
  • If the answer is a NO - then the question is why do we then need it? is CR not enough? Is CR lacking something? How will CR++ be different?
  • If the answer is YES - one already has CR so why another CR++? Will there be time to manage both CR and CR++ in terms of time?

CR++ could have the following advantages:
  1. Multiple teacher driven courses (different versions of the same topic)
  2. Multimedia driven courses means may be faster learnibg and stronger understanding
  3. Students learn anytime anywhere
  4. if you missed CR, use CR++ or if you did not understand CR use CR++ to refresh general problems
  5. Requires infrastructure (communication channel, devices) for all participants
  6. assumption that electricity and BW is relaible)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing Speech Processing Challenges!

Often it is difficult to emphasize the difficulty that one faces during speech signal processing. Thanks to the large population use of speech recognition in the form of Alexa, Google Home when most of us are asking for a very limited information ("call my mother", "play the top 50 international hits" or "switch off the lights") which is quite well captured by the speech recognition engine in the form of contextual knowledge (it knows where you are; it knows your calendar, it know you parents phone number, it knows your preference, it knows your facebook likes .... ). Same Same - Different Different:   You speak X = /My voice is my password/ and I speak Y= /My voice is my password/. In speech recognition both our speech samples (X and Y) need to be recognized as "My voice is my password" while in speaker biometric X has to be attributed to you and and Y has to be attributed to me! In this blog post we try to show   visually   what it means to pro
Post a Comment
Read more

BITS Pilani Goa Campus - Some Useful Information

You have cleared the BIT Aptitude Test and have got admission to BITS Pilani Goa Campus. Congratulation . Well Done. This is how the main building looks! Read on for some useful information, especially since you are traveling for the first time to the campus and more or less you will face the same scenario that we faced! We were asked report on 29-Jul-2018 (Sunday) to take admission on, 30-Jul-2018.  We reached Madgoan (we traveled by train though the airport is pretty close to the BITS campus, primarily to allow us to carry more luggage!)at around 0700 hours (expect a few drizzles to some good rain - so carry an umbrella) on 29-July-2019. As you come out you will be hounded by several taxi drivers, but the best is to take the official pre-paid taxi. It should cost you INR 700 to reach the BITS campus. We had booked a hotel in Vasco (this is one of the closest suburb from BITS campus, a taxi should charge you around 300-350 INR; you will make plenty of trips!) and
2 comments
Read more

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers
Post a Comment
Read more