Social Learning
Posted by saicebrian on December 7, 2009
By Jane Hart
*Don’t forget to nominate the authors!
By etalbert (NSW Dept. of Education)
Very true indeed! i pity the Philippine educational system, while most countries were able to take advantage on the power of the information highway through online learning, we were left still holding the same problem we have for many years like chronic classroom shortages, book shortages, low salary for teachers among others. I wished we have a strong I.T infrastructure not just to support economic activity but also bring 21st century education closer to the people. By the way, i’ve read a research which concludes that countries with high bandwidth have high economic activity and productivity.
Now, educational system is moving from online educational (structure) learning, to social learning (2.0 – according to etalbert). I saw this was coming since we were using ed21classes.com as an online collaboration tool for our EdTech class, which failed since the students seems to open their accounts only during EdTech classes and missing tons of announcements posted online, while students are hooked on Friendster and Facebook and are checking their accounts couple of times a day. Same is true for Yahoogroups which we attempted to use also.
Social Learning is designed to adapt to the changing world of social networking were people (learners), flock to this sites to connect with friends and loved ones and take advantage of the social networking tools and features to bring the classroom beyond the walls of the school building and make it accessible anywhere 24/7 and likewise improve the learners performance in school. Today, we make use of Facebook as an online collaboration tool, we have established an online group for LET REVIEW and for our class. This way, everyone can easily see announcements and share notes with others and discuss the lessons and at the same time connecting also with their friends and love ones or playing Mafia wars, Sorority or writing shoutouts…Facebook became an extension of the classroom, student organizations, personal connections and others all packed on one system.
In public schools in the Philippines, not all of the students makes use of this social networking sites, this prevents us from making use of this educational Technology shift. But i think most of them have cellular phones which might offer some promise to improve the learners performance in school, we can take advantage of the unlimited texting offered by Networks to bring learning to them. I’m still pondering on how we can best use texting to improve the learners performance in school. That would be one of my assignments for the next meeting.. 
Any suggestions???
