When I first began using social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook, I mainly used them as tools to communicate and stay in contact with friends and family. While I’m used to using social media for more personal purposes, there are many pros to incorporating social media with education. Some ways to use social networks is through blogging and social bookmarking. Blogging is a way of expressing one’s personal views on a topic and bookmarking can be used to share some food for thought for those reading your blog or bookmarks. Educators could utilize this venue of communication for class discussions or debates. Not only does social networking make communicating easier and quicker, but it also broadens the number of people one’s thoughts and ideas reach. Instead of just holding discussions in a classroom setting, social networking enables the possibility for people outside of the “class” to give their input too. With the progress technology has made over the past two decades, people have overcome the limitations distance often caused communication. Now, people from various geographical areas around the globe can participate in a debate as long as they have the right technology. For example, on Youtube, I have watched a couple of serious debates discussing religion, ethics, politics, metaphysics, and even the state of human self that people from varying countries participated in.
Admittedly, while social medias can be usefully to education, there are many negative habits social networking has spawned. For many social networks, using abbreviations for words, grammatical errors, incorrect spellings, and incomplete sentences are acceptable ways communication. While that kind of writing may be adequate in the realm of social networking, they should not be used in formal writing. Unfortunately, when students develop bad writing habits due to constant use of social networking lingo, it becomes difficult to purge those habits when needing to write more formal papers and essays needed for higher-level education. Not only does it spawn bad writing habits, it also consumes time that can be better spent towards studying study schoolwork.
Therefore, I believe social networking can be very beneficial to education if it is used correctly.
You're correct to identify two pernicious side-effects of social media: dumbed-down writing and wasted time. We'll see how many people this blog reaches outside the AU225 classroom. It's public so readers can be anyone, anywhere...future employers, your parents, the curious, the argumentative...
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