Facebook is invading education!

M.Ed. ‘E-learning’ Course
Hong Kong
24-29 April, 
2012


Facebook is making serious inroads into education! I’ve taught a lot of Master’s level courses on e-learning in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, and over the last few years there have usually been one or two students in each cohort who’ve chosen to use Facebook as the main platform for the educational resource(s) they’re asked to create. But my recent Hong Kong course, which ran in April this year, is the first time I’ve seen nearly half the projects use Facebook as their main teaching & learning platform. A few years back, e-learning was dominated by blogs and wikis, but Facebook is becoming more and more dominant educationally with every passing year.

Interestingly, a conversation I started on this subject on Facebook itself garnered a lot of comments from educators about how they’d noticed the same thing. Some people asked whether this is a good thing or not. I’d say there are plusses and minuses: a Facebook page or group can function well as a mini-VLE or LMS, with all the advantages and limitations that VLEs and LMSs have. But what is clear is that our students are already in this space, and so are increasing numbers of educators. We need to be thinking about what this means for education.

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