Social learning tools

What is meant by Social Learning Tools?

Social Learning Tools are those tools used for pedagogical^[1] and androgogical^[2] 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 the "Social Learning tools" is to make the education more convenience 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. Some use Sharepoint, Moodle, WordPress, Joomla, Bloomfire, Yammer, eXo Platform or SAP JAM to help host and create content for social learning.

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 create the social learning tools, practitioners will be able to combine both learning and caring by using these tools.

Examples of Social Learning Tools

·Sharepoint It is like an application framework created by Microsoft in 2001 and it provides document and file editor, social networks, workflow automation capabilities and so on.

·Moodle e.g. UCL moodle page [moodle.ucl.ac.uk/my/] Moodle, which is a place for people to access e-learning. We also called it “Learning Management System” or “Virtual Learning Environment”. It is mainly used for teachers to post online courses. Students can learn through logging into the Moodle at any time, any places they want.

·WordPress It is a social blogging tool open to the public, which contains both plugin architecture and a template system for people to write a blog and sharing their experiences with others.

·Joomla It is an open-source content management system. People can publish any web contents as they want, it includes features such as poll, which creates a platform for people who are collecting data from a particular sample.

·Bloomfire It is a software mostly used by businessman. It creates a place for employees to collaborate much more meaningful. What’s more, the information that employees shared are considered as input and transform into knowledge.

·Yammer It is an enterprise social network, and the function of it is quite similar as Bloomfire. What we have to do is just log in with our email address.

·eXo Platform It is written in Java, the main function of eXo Platform is also for business portal.

·SAP jam It helps companies to shorten their sales cycles by adding collaboration, human resources and other processes. And achieving profit maximization by lowering the training costs for the employees through the App learning.

·Enterprise Q&A An SAP integrated solution for crowd sourced knowledge sharing and federated application search to assist the workforce with finding experts and knowledge in real time.

Types of Social Learning Tools people use most frequently

Facebook

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^[3] 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^[4] 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

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.^[5] Therefore, people use Twitter as one way to know the updated information about the society.

Types of Social Learning Tools 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,^[6] 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,^[7] 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. For instance, an App called "GardenScapes" provides a relaxed and informal environment for people, especially those non-English speakers to learn a lot of new words. Each time they will provide you a card where plenty of English words are written on the screen, and you have to find out all the things mentioned in the card in order to pass the level.

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,^[8] 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.^[9]

Effectiveness of Social Learning Tools

1. Convenience

Social Learning Tools provide people a platform to utilize "Distance education",^[10] 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.^[11]

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.

1. 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 wants to get a higher mark in IELTS examination or SAT, it is necessary for them to memorize a lot of vocabularies. What those online learning apps do is to teach them different ways for memorizing the words we are unfamiliar with. And of course, most of them are free charges, e.g. Baicizhan in China.

1. 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.

1. 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.^[12]

drawbacks of Social Learning Tools

• 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 curriculums 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.^[13]

• 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.^[14]

• 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.^[15]

• 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.

See also

• Social learning (social pedagogy)

References