Let me first explain what ‘Social Media’ is and then explore the possibilities of using them for enhancing learning.

Social Media represents the online tools that enable anyone to interact in one-one, one-many and many-many conversational format deviating from typical one-way broadcasting options offered by media. The real-time, borderless interaction offered to participants provide an opportunity to make use of 3Cs Collaboration, Community, Communication effectively to enhance learning and pave way for innovation.

Various Social Media Tools for Learning are:

• Blogging
• Microblogging
• Social Networks
• Podcasting
• Wiki, Google Docs

Why should you Use Social Media for Learning?

According to Lave & Wenger, 1991, “Learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice”. Since we are moving towards a Knowledge-era model, where social networks provide an opportunity to community and individuals to share, construct and reconstruct knowledge, we should make full use of the opportunities offered by social media to enhance better understanding of concepts.

Various Applications of Social Media Tools for Learning

Blogging: Can be used for publishing purposes. In case of group work, blogs can be made use of to share, edit information. The final outcome of group work, after filtering not so important things can be finally published, which can be shared easily. For blogging one can start with Blogger, WordPress and TypePad

Micro Blogging: Twitter plays an important role in enabling short communication of 140 characters among users. It can be used for exchanging reference links and to inform about important announcements such as events, conferences to users.