Social Media and indeed the internet has become quite
ubiquitous with people having access to the internet on virtually any
electronic device from mobile phones’ tablets, video game consoles. To
television sets, decoders and now even watches.
Indeed the internet as a media platform has the advantage
over every other traditional media platform in that it combines all other media
forms (graphic, audio, video and text) for user with access to on-demand TV,
streaming video and audio, inter radio, online news & magazine among
others.
With this this level of interconnectivity and access to
information one wonders how this trend will affect education and the way
students of the current generation learn. A common argument of the older pre-internet
generation points to the fact that growing up, children were made to memorise
spellings or make use of formulas to manually calculate math problems.
Today with the advent of spell checkers, calculators on
every device, search engines and wiki’s on almost every topic in existence, it
would appear that learning has been made easier but; is there a price to this
ease of learning? Let’s take a look at the positive and negative effects that
social media/internet poses.
Positives Effect of social media to learning.
1) Social Media did make the world a
smaller place, now we have more information, more knowledge, and have better
opportunities to use it.
2) Social media improved our ability
to absorb information, what would have seemed to be over whelming to someone 20
years ago is normal to us, we have an extreme ease in processing and we are
evolving quickly.
3) Social media helps students have
better direction of what they want. Now they have ease of reaching mentors in
the same industry and people already working in their dream company, and get a
taste of what it is like, this was quite impossible for students 10 years ago.
4) Student get closer to art and
design, and are exposed continuity to new ideas and are given a big chance to
feed their creativity.
5) Talents get discovered faster.
Students who were good at programming got their name out their easily, student
who were good in music got their videos out and shared leading them to their
dreams.
6) Google and education. Google has
helped over 20million students in their education using their tools.
A lot of the students are able to
inform public about their issues- using
social media which
NEGATIVES
1) Students are having a harder time
getting to communicate face to face with people, and losing their people
skills, due to that they are spending more and more time talking from behind a
screen.
2) The attention to details,
pronunciation and grammar, has declined drastically because most o the
communication that happens online is not proper.
3) Our ability to retain information
has decreased and the willingness to spend more time researching and looking up
good information has reduced, due to the fact that we got used to the ease of
accessibility to information on social media.
4) Social media has become a major
distraction to students causing the overall performance of students to decline,
especially the ones who tend to check their Facebook and twitter accounts while
studying
1
Overall, the positive effects far outweigh the negative and
while adjusting to how we manage the usage of the social media. Paying
attention to children’s academic progress and addressing any issues will go a
long way towards keeping the negative aspect s of social media from influencing
their studies.
culled from fusion magazine.
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