Social learning tools

Social Learning Tools are those tools used for pedagogical and androgogical purposes that utilize social software and/or social media in order to facilitate learning through interactions between people and systems. The idea of setting up the "Social Learning tools" is to make the education more convenient and widespread. Therefore, people can acquire knowledge by distance learning tools, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, whatsapp and so on. Social Learning Tools may mediate in formal or informal learning environments to help create connections between learners, instructors and information. These connections form dynamic knowledge networks. Companies are using social learning to improve knowledge transfer within departments and across teams and use a variety of tools to create a social learning environment.

These tools are used for people who are willing to share their good ideas with someone else. The ideas can be related to either the academic studies or any other daily skills that we want to share with others. It does not simply meant by being about teaching, instead, it is more about thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learner, who are willing to care about the learners and exactly brings the learning into our daily life. Through create the social learning tools, practitioners will be able to combine both learning and caring by using these tools.

Social networking such as Facebook, has been ranked as the top 100 examples of learning tools that people use most frequently. The director of Customer Support for Articulate, Gabe Anderson said that he uses Facebook to check any updated information that are happening nearby. And by clicking the link that people share on their Facebook page, he is able to seeing how his friends feel about the information and what the opinions are. Furthermore, an instructional designer, Pennsylvania said that what learners on Facebook do are just to create an account with a profile. Right afterward, people find someone who are also fascinated in what they are interested in and share different ideas through Facebook.

Twitter, a free social online networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and receive messages of up to 140 characters. It is funded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Media outlets in particular use Twitter as a way to broadcast breaking news. Therefore, people use Twitter as one way to know the updated information about the society.

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Wikipedia