ICT In Higher Education Africa 2012

Social networking can play a very useful role in teacher/learner engagement. Applications like Facebook and Twitter come preinstalled on most cell phones. This means that there are no custom development overheads; ICT does not have to develop applications for the plethora of devices out there. Students are familiar with these applications and there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve in most cases.

Now a teacher may ask “What about sharing docs?” Surely these apps cannot cater for those? Well maybe not directly, but you can post links to docs stored on the internet (the cloud). Tools like Dropbox, Skydrive etc. give you the capability to store documents privately (for your use only) or publicly. Once the doc has been uploaded you get a link that you can them share on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, whatever.

Another nice thing about social networking is that learners can take part in the discussion from anywhere. If the learner can’t make to class for whatever reason, nothing stops him/her from taking part in the discussion or from following posts made in the classroom. What works really nicely is when a student or students post key point made by the lecturer. It creates a transcript of what was said in class and is really nice for reviews afterwards!

What I will do in future posts is go into more detail per application and show how it can help in the classroom.

Another point that was made is that there is no perfect solution out there. In fact, nobody really wants to commit to what they are using. The idea is to create a better learning environment regardless of the technology used.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have anything to add, or contact me:

• Twitter account: @ShaunMeyerWork
• Twitter hash (A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic, NMMU Blended Learning in our case): #NMMUBlendedLearning
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NMMUBlendedLearning