With the development of internet technology, social media has become a huge part of people’s daily life. It seems like everything is better if they are tied to social media; for example; advertising, learning, marketing, researching, and more. It is obvious that people nowadays check social media more often than any other forms of media. It allows people to communicate and connect with others all around the world, and learn from other people’s experience.
Learning via social media is interesting. With the unlimited resources from the internet and a huge amount of people to talk, learning can much easier. On social media, people with the same interests or goals usually will form some online communities. Those communities are usually an open community, which means people can join and leave freely and they can choose to talk and share or watch and learn from other’s discussion. As Major (2015) states in her book TEACHING ONLINE, there are five types of people in a learning community based on how they participate: Peripheral, Inbound, Insider, Boundary, and Outbound. These categories usually reflex how long people have been participating in that community. In my experience, I found this theory very true. Unlike other learning groups where learners start at the same time, learning communities on social media are much more flexible. Due to the variety of choices and quality of the learning communities, people are always joining or leaving. In my opinion, it is one of the greatest advantages of an online learning community. If you are not interested in what people are talking about or the group does not fit you, you can always find another group of people to join and learn. Just like Major (2015) suggests, people’s journey in an online learning community is a cycle. First, they join and listen to other people’s conversations. Then, they become more and more participating inside the group until there is nothing left to learn or they lose their interest. After that, they participate less and less. At last, they leave the community and join a new one. With all being said, I think that social media is a great way of learning and the process of connecting with a learning community is very interesting.
Reference:
Claire Howell Major. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 227-229, ‘Networks and Sets’.)
Picture by Rahul Chakraborty, retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/xsGxhtAsfSA