Social Media and Adult Education

 As a student, I have a love-hate relationship with target artifacts. Sometimes, I am so focused on the task that I do not notice them. You may also think that I am busy and that would be true, too. Nevertheless, when I check target artifacts, I wonder: Can I make something that will be comparable to this? How can I make it mine? I have observed a similar attitude in my students' behavior. So far, I have been using weekend challenges to support my students' receptive skills, which are listening and reading, mainly by using YouTube videos. This week, I have a completely new kind of challenge, which will be focusing on knowledge application and creating a short presentation. Making a presentation is not a small feat for an intermediate language learner. It requires focus, attention, factual knowledge, the digital skills, the ability to resist the use of AI, AND restraint. How can they learn these skills the best? It seems that they could benefit from cooperative learning in small...

 I was really excited while I was reading this week's article about the Social Media Toolkit because the article is a treasure-trove of ideas for the use of social media in instruction. Even though its original focus was oriented toward higher education, it is obvious that the Toolkit can be applied to other learning contexts, as well. First, the Framework for Social Media that the authors used helped me see the big picture behind the use of social media in the classroom. They focus on four main areas, or core functions: instructional methods, knowledge levels, content types, and assessment.  Second, social media is categorized according to its purpose into six groups: social networking, media sharing, document sharing, live communication, collaboration, and blogging and microblogging.  Third, the Decision Matrix is the outcome of the application of the Framework for Social Media to different categories of social media. The resulting Social Media Toolkit helps ins...

Salomon (2016) discusses the fact that while technology can provide information, it cannot transform it into knowledge. He then proceeds to differentiate between the affordances that technology offers and the actual realization of its use. Coincidentally, this week, when I was evaluating language apps, I stumbled upon a similar question: To what extent does the language app make use of its mobile affordances? I was shocked to find out that from among the four apps that I was evaluating (Duolingo, Mango Languages, Busuu, and Burlington English), only one (Busuu) made use of the benefits traditionally offered by SNSs.  If you are wondering why that would be beneficial, think how many hours you spent on Duolingo trying to learn a new language. The problem is that most language apps not only ignore the development of productive skills (speaking and writing), but also their mobile function (recording, time and place fluidity). In reality, this means that most language apps are just a li...