Week 3: Social Technology Beginner - Option 1

What is Social Media?

Social Media is the collection of different types of communication application that has been using throughout the past few years. This helps people to interact with each other and create their very own blogs and share their thoughts, feelings and ideas through people. 

Here is a video that explain about what Social Media is.   

Experience 1: Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking application and that helps people to keep in touch and interact around the world. It has the option to share short 140 character messages with followers which called “tweets”. People who are already registered can read and comment on posts but for the unregistered users can only see them. Users can access Twitter by using the mobile application.   

It was bit hard and confusing at the beginning to understand how it works but the more you use it, the easier it will get. It’s more like to use to keep in touch with people and share your thoughts and pictures around the world but it shows all your posts and pictures to the public but they can’t comment on them if you are not a follower.  

How could Twitter assist me as a student?

Twitter is a large platform for students to find information for their projects or download eBooks. By typing hash tag (#) and particular topic on the search bar, Twitter will give you the list of data that is related to your topic. Twitter also launched an application called TweetScan to help students to find their information and then they will email the data to you.

Twitter can help us as students to interact with our colleagues while working on a project at university level. There are some people in a group who are shy to interact with other colleagues and sometimes they find it hard to make study buddies at university. Twitter can be one of the tools for them to discuss and share their ideas with other members and also they can share important links related to the projects.        

Experience 2:  Blogs

Using blogs as a leaning tool can help students in many ways to develop their skills while studying. It’s not just students who have the capability of using a Blog to gain skills. Even professors, lecturers and tutors can also develop their skills and they can share assignments through the blog site and it is possible for students to view it from anywhere. Not only use to share information but also it use to engage with the tutors and connect with them straight away rather than waiting and emailing.

How can Blogs assist me as a student?

 Blogging as a leaning tool has helped me a lot in the past few weeks to develop my writing and thinking skills. Not only that, I had the chance to share my own thoughts and feeling with colleagues and engage with them. I have improved myself in thinking creatively and critically and also I think it will be easier for me to do a group assignment and collaborate with other members of the group on a blog when we can’t meet up in person.        

References

Rossow, P. (2013). 5 ways twitter can help in education. Retrieved from http://gettingsmart.com/2013/09/5-ways-twitter-can-help-in-education/

Wallagher, M. (2014). Blogs for education. Retrieved from http://supportblogging.com/educationalblogging/