Facebook for teaching and learning
November 10, 2008 on 7:02 pm by Thomas | In Campaigns, Stylewalker | 2 CommentsI wrote the following article together with Max Senges and Peter Bihr for the UOC Fórum Innovació.
Social Communities have grown rapidly over the last years, offering people the chance to publish personal information and connect with each other. The biggest social community today is Facebook with more than 120 million members. Due to the myriad possibilities to use Facebook, there many ways to support teaching and learning.
Facebook started in 2004 at Harvard University and was aimed at connecting students. Now, almost every American student and many Europeans have profiles on Facebook. They use it to share information, such as links, photos and videos, to arrange real life events and to communicate in groups.
From: http://www.apple.com/au/education/digitalkids/disconnect/landscape.htmlFace
The use of Facebook also shows the current cultural differences between teachers who slowly have to adapt to new technologies and students who grew up with digital communication. The differences in media use and learning behaviour between so called “digital native learners” and “digital immigrant teachers” are shown below. Understanding how to use Facebook opens up a way to stepping closer to actual student behaviour and to create a more appropriate way of teaching.
Read on at the UOC Fórum Innovació.
Facebook for Services, students create job and service profiles
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[...] produce more steady output. Partly we cover basics, partly more edgy ideas. This one is a classic, Thomas about how Facebook can be of value for university education: Social Communities have grown rapidly [...]
Pingback by Facebook for teaching and learning — 13/11/2008 #
This is a very interesting topic. In my view Facebook is a place for friendships, that happened to have started at a University. (Remember that Facebook was closed to University students only for quite some time). Facebook is not a place to learn or teach, even though a few of hundreds of thousands of apps are about learning.
Yet, learning is social – hence the need for a web where education happens in a more – “social network” way. I think traditional eLearning systems will change significantly in this regard. These next generation “Social Learning Networks” will have to be integrated with Facebook. Just like any school has places to teach and places to be with friends.
We at Sclipo aim to build such Social Learning Network. We have built a series of learning apps (course manager, web classroom, etc.) into a social network structure. And we have integrated with Facebook through Connect.
I invite you to check out Sclipo and would love your feedback. Here a quick overview of Sclipo:
http://sclipo.com/documents/view/4310
Comment by Gregor Gimmy — 9/4/2009 #