Online Education: Study Shows Social Networking a Boon for Education

If a kid is sitting in front of computer doing social networking or chatting with friend or your colleague sitting in pool 3 at HHL surfing orkut.com or facebook.com does not mean that he/ she is not doing something fruitful… the recent studies and the survey done with the students (ranging between 9 to 17) has revealed that now kids use social networking for their education purpose like purpose of college planning, learning outside of school, careers and schoolwork.
A school in clevand, Ohio is posting student book reports on a blog for their peers, teachers and parents to read and comment on. For instances, Students working on science project can go through the blogs of global warning and during campaign seasons political blogs give students the ground for debating…
Article here on this link http://www.education.com/magazine/article/online_ed/tells that collaboration, self direction and problem solving are some skills that social networking helps student to practice. When parents ask their kids 'What homework do you have? What did you do today in school? May not sound good to students and probably some of you also must have felt it bit irritating but now parents can go online and know what the class is doing and of course what their children are doing…..
Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Board Association, the organization which did the survey realizes importance of Education through social networking and states that “There are some really intelligent, topic specific blogs. We're not saying we should unblock all filters, but schools and parents should open up the conversation and figure out what to block and what to filter,”
Another point here is the social networking activities of children can also help to keep parents up-to-date with their knowledge too….Education through social networking is becoming very popular not only on school level but also on higher education level. The following website gives some insight regarding the contribution of social networking in higher education. http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2008/09/04/social-networking-in-higher-education/

This blog informs about the student online community twitter, which has changed the culture on campus and has given students ways to connect across their university students and can use twitter to ask for help, work on projects, discuss topics during conferences, schedule impromptu lunches, and offer things for sale. Students plan meetings, find opportunities to collaborate and have become a much more connected, intelligent, communicative group that now includes people from several Penn State campuses, departments and academic colleges. This gives the example of twitter of Penn State where members of twitter are IT professionals, professors, advisers, learning designers, and students. Social networking in education has increased a lot and got a lot of potential the website (http://www.infinitethinking.org/2008/01/social-networking-in-education.html ) talks about the class2.0 which is a network of Teachers.

This is just a beginning in the application of social networking in Education and there a lot to be seen in future… or may be who knows 10-15 year down the line Google and Yahoo open their own MBA classes with online social networking group assignments and online classes with online exams like they have thousand of books scanned on their search engines and could be class room studies is just a concept in the future……....