Social Media in Education

Social media has a great deal of potential for education. Ever since the advent of social communities and collaboration in education technology, such as the pioneering PLATO Learning System, powerful tools have been developed that enable learners to collaborate on documents, share thoughts, obtain feedback on questions or ideas, and to be able to interact with their peers and instructors outside of the traditional classroom time and space. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights some of the recent methodologies and research regarding the uses of social networks in learning.

However, while social media tools, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be very useful for the learning process, they are not without their downsides.

Revisiting PLATO, a Pioneering Learning Technology

Growing up in Urbana, Illinois in the 1980's, I was fortunate that my school district was privy to the PLATO Learning System, created and managed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a child, I was able to access PLATO, an innovative system that pioneered the first online community and e-learning systems. The plasma touchscreen was a true precursor of today's tablet computers, and the system provided messaging and chat rooms before anyone had a computer at home, much less an internet connection.