Question

Dabbagh, N., and A. Kitsantas. 2012. “Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning.” Internet and Higher Education15(1): 3-8.

Write a short summary after reading this article. Does not have to be more than a page. If you can please focus on the subject "THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION SHOULD MANDATE A CLASS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA".

Answer 1

Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning

An environment for personal learning is the one in which there would be a teaching approach where, there would be formal as well as informal approaches for learning, in contexts of higher education. PLE has come up as a new construct in the literature of e learning, which has been gaining popularity on social media. This is understood to have become one of the best platforms, such that there would be creation, Organisation as well as sharing of content.

PLEs have been built on a tool of Web 2.0 platform. Social media had become an informal learning space, which helped in higher education. It has been seen that blogging would be helping the students for directing the learning material, such that there would be an increased in the engagement with the course material and their would be promotion of formation of informal communities of learning.

Social media has often been considered to be distracting the students, in such a situation, PLE has come up with entire new dynamics that regulate informal learning, with the involvement of social media. Though, in order to completely use PLE in the best form, it is required that there should be proper classes for the use of social media such that the students wouldn’t get distracted while using the correct information. There are different platforms such as blogs, wikis, Flickr or even networking g that would be encouraging the students to create their career profile or academic profiles, to indulge into the community. Unless properly guided, social media could do more harm than benefit the students in learning.