Social learning tools are those tools used for pedagogical and androgogical purposes that utilize social software and/or social media in order to facilitate learning through interactions between people and systems. The idea of setting up "social learning tools" is to make education more convenient and widespread. Therefore, people can acquire knowledge by distance learning tools, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp and so on. Social learning tools may mediate in formal or informal learning environments to help create connections between learners, instructors and information. These connections form dynamic knowledge networks. Companies are using social learning to improve knowledge transfer within departments and across teams and use a variety of tools to create a social learning environment.
These tools are used for people who are willing to share their good ideas with someone else. The ideas can be related to either the academic studies or any other daily skills that we want to share with others. It does not simply meant by being about teaching, instead, it is more about thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learner, who are willing to care about the learners and exactly brings the learning into our daily life. Through creating social learning tools, practitioners will be able to combine both learning and caring by using these tools.
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Types of frequently used tools
Social networking such as Facebook, has been ranked as the top 100 examples of learning tools that people use most frequently. The director of Customer Support for Articulate, Gabe Anderson said that he uses Facebook to check any updated information that are happening nearby. And by clicking the link that people share on their Facebook page, he is able to seeing how his friends feel about the information and what the opinions are. Furthermore, an instructional designer, Pennsylvania said that what learners on Facebook do are just to create an account with a profile. Right afterward, people find someone who are also fascinated in what they are interested in and share different ideas through Facebook.
Twitter, a free social online networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and receive messages of up to 140 characters. It is funded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Media outlets in particular use Twitter as a way to broadcast breaking news. Therefore, people use Twitter as one way to know the updated information about the society.
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Types of environments
Social learning tools environments can help create connections between learners, teachers and knowledge that we are going to acquire. The environment can be either formal or informal.
- Formal learning, which means that the process of acquiring knowledge happens within a school, college, institute or university. Lecturers in the University of College London use Moodle page to post the latest information to students, e.g. courseware they used during the lecture, coursework, quizzes, and forums. Students can both preview and review for what teachers talked at any time they want.
- Informal learning, which means that people get the information inadvertently and it usually happens in our daily life. The informal learning environment mostly happens during the conversation between people, and also the enlargement and exploration of personal experience. A host of circumstances are considered as the informal learning environments.
Another example of informal learning environment is social media, e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Television channels and so on. There are a lot of Foods & Delights TV Channels teaching people who are interesting in cooking, the chief mostly starts with showing audiences what kind of ingredients they need, the level of optimal fire they should use and how to makes it more attractive by adding some sauce. People learn how to cook dishes at any time, any places they want, what they need is just opening the television or opening the web page to watch the live broadcast.
A historical review of educational programming in Finland was provided by Aarreniemi-Jokipelto in 2006, as what the reports mentioned, the educational TV in Finland runs almost parallel to that of US, the reason for such a devastating development of taking TV as a learning tool is the wish to educate students at home. Moreover, play, the key word for describing informal learning environment. An ITV game called Winky Dink, every time when the characters in the game need some help, kids will be asked to use their crayons to draw on the electrical screen, and give assistance to the character. So the game ensures that kids do enjoy themselves and learn new things which they draw when they are watching and helping Winky-dinky in his adventures.
Effectiveness
- Convenience
Social learning tools provide people a platform to utilize "distance education", people can no longer spend too much time on transportation in order to learn in somewhere. They don't need to be face-to-face communicate with teachers anymore. For the business, they can use the internet or some particular technological systems to improve knowledge transfer within departments and across teams. It can encourage communication and the exchange of knowledge and ideas throughout the department, with the introduction of social learning tools.
What's more, they can use the social learning tools, e.g. Yammer to share their working experience with others, they can also discussing the project process by posting their ideas on the forum. They don't necessarily to have a meeting which makes their working more convenience.
- Cost-efficient, save money
People can use social learning tools to gain information they want. For example, people who watch "MasterChef" learn how to cook dishes without paying anything. They don't need to go and have training in the Food Institute, which help them to cut their daily budgets.
Another example is that students who want to get a higher mark in IELTS examination or SAT need to memorize many new vocabulary words. What those online learning apps do is to teach them different ways for memorizing the words they are unfamiliar with.
- Promote commerce
If the business creates a forum for customers to write their feedbacks, they can have more ideas about how to improve their products, which helps the company to create better marketing strategies.
- Students in the TV learning education environment achieve better learning performance than their counterparts in the traditional environment
Social learning tools have some special functions, such as computer self-efficacy, which means that the people can designate different types of performance according to their capabilities and choose different ways to learn things on computer according to their personal demand. Students can learn at different steps and different speed according to their personal understanding and learning capability.
Drawbacks
- Instructors or teachers may need to spend a long time on learning how to teach electronically
A survey pointed out that the misusing or poor usage of the computer technology and apply it into the curricula can let the students down, because teachers have to spend a long time in figuring out which type of social learning tools would be most adaptable for their courses and how to achieve their goals by using these tools.
- Increase the rate of plagiarism in students' coursework
Students tend to finish their coursework with the help of social learning tools, e.g. internet, TV and so on. Whatever the teachers like it or nor, accept it or not, students all make reference on the internet and make use of it for their academic coursework. They think and considerate the problem by simply typing on the keyboard or opening the television, instead of thinking the problem deeply in mind. Day by day, their brains will be liked a machine which is run out off the power and work slowly. They will be adapted with the situation and become much more lazy than before.
- Purchase of multimedia equipment and some facilities may be necessary
There are constantly changes on using different kinds of social learning tools due to different courses require different tools, colleges or individual have to pay a lot for different charged learning tools.
- Lack of face-to-face interaction
People prefer to communicate through these social learning tools, e.g. Facebook, Skype. They spend much more time on online learning with the help of social learning tools and ask friends by using Skype or other social media tools if they have some problems. They don't need to gathering together anymore if they have already adapted by using these tools to communicate and share their opinions.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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