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.