Can social networking tools such as MySpace and Facebook be turned into an e-learning intstrument to help people learn something new?
The answer is YES! Social networking sites are filled with exceptional functionality that allow users to post information about anything for people to use. Users can also setup groups, meetings, and online chats for others to view. For example, if you wanted to teach people about cooking, you could begin to just put new recipes and tutorials for creating new dishes. From just doing what you love, and share, users are already beggining to teach people new and exciting things.
There is a great article from http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2007/10/facebook-as-learning-platform.html , where he talks about “Facebook as a Learning Plateform”.
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Switching gears, I would like to talk about something new that I have experienced, and has really been a big help to me. This new technology is called Adobe Acrobat Connect (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/). This allows users to log in anywhere in the world using Acrobat Connect, and connect to a video discussion. I recently was able to connect to a video discussion by Jonathan Campos about “Turning MXML components to ActionScript 3.0″. This could be a great tool for teachers outside of class.
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And last, I would like to see more web blogs being turned into a learning environment. I believe these are very versatile and dynamic, but not dynamic enough. Sure you can post new articles, and comment on other peoples, but where is the instant user 2 user interaction? I think this is where blogs need to be heading in the future. Blog 2 Blog chatting, group rooms, and blog mashups. Mashups are web applications that combine data into one area for easy viewing. Examples of these are Digg.com, and Igoogle.
Filed under: E-Learning
I never really though about Facebook in that way before reading the article you provided. It has a lot of useful features especially for an e-learning environment. The Adobe Acrobat Connect looks amazing. That is surely something worth trying out. Do you know if when doing e-learning through them do they provide you the layout or do you use what you’ve created? Basically how is the final outcome determined? Thanks for blogging about this and helping me learn something new.
I feel the same way as the student in the first blog. I want to create a useful app and get paid for it. LOL. We’ll see. But I do think that it is a great learning tool. The adobe link was very helpful, too. I like it and will have to spend some more time with it, but think that it is an awesome way to help people learn. I had never thought to do something like this for any of my sites.
I like your enthusiasm in your post, it seems like you have had some good first-hand experiences with these technologies for e-learning.
I definitely need to look into that Adobe online video discussion, that sounds like it could be a really useful tool.