A Reasonable Proxy

In past few years, variety of communication tools such as mobile phone, PDA’s (Person Digital Assistants), digital audio players-iPOD, iPhones, have been evolved as commodity items in general public lives. Parallel to this, there has been rapid development of the dynamic, interactive capacity of the web. Social media enabled users to share, tweet, assemble, disseminate, rate, comment, tag, and favorite information in all mediums. Such as text, image, sound, video, and create contents. Examples are Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) January 2001, LinkedIn (professional networking) May 2003, MySpace (social networking) August 2003, del.icio.us (social bookmarking) September 2003, Facebook (social networking) January 2004, Flickr (Image and Video Hosting) February 2004, YouTube (video sharing) February 2005, Twitter (micro-blogging) July 2006, Xing (business social networking) November 2006.

These participatory media sites and tools are designed so friendly, that doesn't require currency of skills, but essential knowledge, indeed. Users, particularly generation ‘Y’ tending to be in the front line, for integrating new devices, are shaping their lives, behaviors, attitudes, learning and approaches in line with the features of these advanced technologies. They are feeling overwhelmed and ‘digitally-social’.

This digitalized learning tool can also facilitate those learners whom are unable to take part of a classroom community, for some or even all, of the time-particularly part-time, distance and increasingly, work-based-social media may be a reasonable proxy. Due to its wider influence in our lives it’s hard to ignore Web 2.0 as an integral part of curriculum in the area of computing and media.

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Social Media and Higher Education

Today students, learners, and scholars, are living in a digital age. Having Web 2.0 technology environment they are very much exposed to the wide range of Social Web tools and software that provide gateways to a multiplicity of interactive resources for information, entertainment and, mainly communication.

Web 1.0 was all about delivering content, primarily in the form of online courses and produced by experts, teachers or subject matter experts. While Web 2.0 is about user generated content (UGC) in a variety of formats and sharing information and knowledge using social media tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and social networks within an educational or training context to help and support a new collaborative approach to learning.

"My vision of school/classroom 2.0 is, more than anything else, about conversations. Traditional schools involved teachers and textbooks delivering information to students, and students reflecting that information back. To better serve their future, today’s classrooms should facilitate teaching and learning as a conversation — two-way conversations between teachers and learners, conversations between learners and other learners, conversations among teachers, and new conversations between the classroom and the home and between the school and its community (David Warlick)."

“Social Media is a blend of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one-to-many) into dialogues (many-to-many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers (Wikipedia).”

Higher educations providers are now seriously thinking, how to adopt social media for its blended learning system. They are now starting to believe that these social media tools can be utilized to enhance the creative process by engaging students, staff, researchers, in conversation and discussions.

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