Facebook – The Next Learning Management System
Posted by admin on 22 Jul 2009 at 07:00 am | Tagged as: Moodle, Social Media, The Web, eLearning, education
Facebook basically started out as a way for some college friends to stay in touch, but has been opened up to the world and is one of the largest social mediums in the business. So how much time during a school day do students spend on Facebook versus the school’s Learning Management System (LMS)?
My guess is Facebook wins hands down. That is why educators are trying to create Facebook Apps to interact with students or to combine Facebook with their LMS. A few noteworthy FB Apps that I have come across are Podclass, Sclipo, and H-Link. They all have great features, but they can’t 100% replace a LMS yet. At best they create a mash-up of the two.
Right now Facebook is on a high and has a great potential to get back into education. While educators try to integrate Facebook with their LMS, Facebook could develop a LMS integrated with facebook. Until then I will continue to look for FB Apps that will help me mash-up Facebook and Moodle.
Very true–Facebook, we should remember, didn’t begin with image-obsessed, camera-toting teenagers. It began as a way for college students to network online. So it shouldn’t be surprising or if students and educators use it in its original context: as a way to connect peers in a learning system.
And though I don’t agree with the Blue Skunk’s decree, that “Every website shall remain unblocked until proven to be ‘harmful to minors’” (there are simply too many sites to review without using a filtering product, flawed as that may be) I do think there could be a place for Web 2.0 technologies like social networking sites in schools.