How will new forms of Social Media change Education?

How will new forms of Social Media Change Education?

Web 2.0 saw the Internet move away from static ‘access only’ webpages into an arena in which learners could interact with one another, comment on things and engage in safe social networking and assessment tools. The changes that Web 2.0 caused in education have in many schools been huge in terms of transforming the way in which computers have been used as a vehicle through which to guide learning and also in terms of the training, policies and processes that have needed to be developed to cope with the changing nature of online communications.

Most schools now make use of Web 2.0 features as part and parcel of their offerings, via discussion forms on their website; password protected blogs within VLE’s and the introduction of E-portfolio’s as a means of teaching pupils how to use social networking safely and effectively. However as technology changes we need to ensure that our educational policies are forward thinking and that curriculum design is future proofed to ensure that new technological advances can be utilised, where appropriate, to enhance the learning experience.

What are the emerging trends in Internet usage and Social Media?

Some observers have suggested that the emerging forms of Social Media and new ‘live’ searches are the beginning of what may be called Web 3.0. The following quotations outline some of these trends:

Web 3.0′s early geosocial (Foursquare, etc.) and augmented reality (Layar, etc.) webs are an extension of Web 2.0′s participatory technologies and social networks (Facebook, etc.) into 3D space. Of all its metaverse-like developments, Smart suggests Web 3.0′s most defining characteristic will be the mass diffusion of NTSC-or-better quality open video to TVs, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, a time when “the internet swallows the television.

Source: Wikipedia

What is Web 3.0? It is the next fundamental change both in how websites are created and, more importantly, how people interact with them.

Source: About.com

In the case of Web 3.0, most Internet experts agree about its general traits. They believe that Web 3.0 will provide users with richer and more relevant experiences. Many also believe that with Web 3.0, every user will have a unique Internet profile based on that user’s browsing history. Web 3.0 will use this profile to tailor the browsing experience to each individual. That means that if two different people each performed an Internet search with the same keywords using the same service, they’d receive different results determined by their individual profiles.

Source: How Stuff Works

How will this affect education?

The key features of these new trends are largely examples of increased personalisation of the Internet. This clearly has an implication in terms of child protection and Internet usage monitoring within schools.

Many commentators refer to examples of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality applications as becoming integral components of Web usage in the near future. The early examples of these appear to have a great deal of potential educationally: though also pose a whole set of new ‘issues’ to overcome. The post on Augmented Reality explores some of the emerging AR applications and the way that these can be utilised to good effect educationally.

The growth of ‘live’ searches and the growing trend of using social networking sites as search engines also poses a number of questions for schools. If the major search engines move towards this type of search, and base their aligorithms upon this, how should schools react? Currently most filtering systems would block this type of search: but can this continue to be the case if the Internet Industry moves in this direction?

The ‘virtual web’ is already beginning to emerge. We have seen several high quality examples of virtual worlds being used within schools and found some of the examples demonstrated at our last Education & Technology Conference to be highly engaging, hugely interesting and of great potential to teachers at all levels.

How will it affect the way that we use our school website or VLE?

One of the advantages of using CMS based websites as a school is that as new technolgies emerge they can be integrated into the web platform by the developers. This ensures that change is gradual, and the result of extensive development and testing: meaning that your site is always capable of including the most up to date resource formats. Likewise your VLE will be updated to enable new technologies to be incorporated into lessons and courses: think back 10 years and few people then would have imagined seeing VLE’s incorporating video conferencing, microblogs and high definition video.

Changing patterns in the way that people search the ‘net and the way that Search Engines work

With the search engine market being dominated by Google and engines powered by Bing at the moment it’s relatively easy to keep an eye on the way that search engines are changing. The first change that affects education is the move towards ‘live’ and ‘local’ searches. These are designed to make the results as relevant as possible to the user by placing them into real time context. However this means that internet filtering software will need to be even more powerful than before in order to ensure that the ‘live’ elements of the search are safe. On the one hand it would be very easy to simply block results from social media websites: but is that actually doing a service or a disservice to youngsters? If news and current affairs, for example, are to be integrated into the curriculum, surely the new methods of reporting and disseminating news and comment ought to be enabled within schools? (Or at least for more mature students).

New types of Social Media

Some of these aren’t actually all that ‘new’ but the impact that they are having in education is still relatively limited or developing:

Twitter – it’s been around for a while now. It has many uses in and outside of the classroom. This blog post outlines 50 ways in which Twitter can be used to good effect in education.

Foursquare – one of the more recent developments. Foursquare has a range of potential uses for educators, some of which are outlined here.

Mobile Learning – there are a plethora of different devices available and thousands of downloadable apps that can be used to enhance learning (far too many to list in one Blog post). A rough guide to using mobile devices in education can be read here.

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