Social networking can play an important role in enhancing powerful ideas, when it comes to technologyrelated learning. Students can explore new information, express thoughts and share ideas that will pave the way for new ways of thinking.
Social media and emerging technologies - such as blogs, wikis, Ning, MySpace, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, cloud computing, surface computing and mobile learning - are gaining increasing attention in higher education and are having an impact on today's trends in learning and teaching, according to Siemens and Cormier.
It is understood that these technological tools can establish a new learning ground for any subject. Social networking can connect students with friends, colleagues or even total strangers. They can express their ideas on various topics of common interest.
Horizon Project Research identified social networking as likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning and creative inquiry on college and university campuses within five years.
This is because social networking websites know who the user's friends are and may also know people that the user would like to meet or things the user would like to do. Indeed, these sites fundamentally facilitate communities - communities of practice as well as social communities.
Students have become tremendously interested in social networking sites because of the community, content and activities they can do there. They can share information about them¬selves, find out what their peers think about top¬ics of interest to them, share music and playlists and exchange messages with their friends.
Two of the bestknown examples, MySpace and Facebook, have thousands of members who connect daily or hourly. Researchers note that online spaces like MySpace and Facebook give students a safe place to gather, in much the same way that young people of previous generations hung out together.
The way these sites bring people together makes them powerful and exciting. This is the next step after portals - to harness the power of social networking to build rich, interactive and robust learning communities.
Social networking applications across disci¬plines are aimed at encouraging communing and selfexpression. Campusbased social network¬ing sites offer a safe, convenient space for stu¬dents to build ties with community members and experiment with developing a public self.
Having used various cam¬pus learning management systems for my teaching, I have recently seen that social networking has the power to further open the world to students, through a shareable, computational, dynamic and interactive environment. It enhances digital literacy and technological fluency.
Students live in a technologically rich culture where there is deep knowledge about, familiarity with and passion for building and applying technology towards the attainment of personal, group or social goals. The current boom of social software tools can foster technology fluency.
Social networking sites are among the fastest growing, mostused sites on the Internet, and the features that make them so compelling are features that we need to understand and incorporate into higher education websites.
The new semester and new freshmen are coming to campus soon. We lecturers can inspire them towards powerful ideas. Let's wisely deploy the social networking environment in the class¬room.
Priyakorn Pusawiro: Learning Scientist
Computer Engineering Department, KMUTT