In their article, “Schooling as a Knowledge Profession,” Jal D. Mehta, Louis M. Gomez, & Anthony S. Bryk, point out various flaws with the current educational system, the greatest of which being that we are still operating within a paradigm that mirrors the antiquated trends of the industrial age.
Today, the biggest challenge in the field of Education is the Quality of education. More and more educational organizations are adapting the Social Learning Model which is indeed changing the world as we know it.
Social Learning is a powerful blend of Social networking and e-learning, which is transforming the traditional classroom education to an online collaborative platform for teaching, learning and improving the student’s performance by shortening the time needed for mastering, increasing retention, and increasing engagement.
The Social Learning has been in existence for more than a dozen years, yet its impact in terms of masses is still relatively low in comparison with other educational approaches.
The rise of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and various blogging sites has played a role in revolutionizing the educational system. In the past, students would attend class, take notes, take a test and be done with that subject or class. During this time, teachers would have a finite amount of time to interact with students, pose questions, fuel conversation, etc. However, there has been a trend shift towards the incorporation of more social media outlets into the education system, albeit on an informal basis.
Now, when students get out of class, they have the opportunity to share their thoughts, experiences, and class notes with their peers, those in their classes as well as those who are not. Furthermore, educators also have the chance to pose questions outside of class for students to think about: questions, which are also available to the public for responses and reflections (Source).
The beauty of social media as it pertains to social learning is that discussion is opened up to a broader audience outside of the classroom. Students and educators alike now have the ability to discuss what they are learning and teaching with a much wider community, and with that, we get a wider amount of people each having the potential to keep the conversation going by bringing their own unique perspective.
It is clear that social media has already changed the face of the education system for the better. There are more people than ever for us to learn from.
Which came first, the problem or the solution? Luckily it doesn’t mttaer.
It is about time that these revisions could spbsioly be implemented. Ontario brought their revisions a few years ago. Many students still have difficulty fathoming their impact on the world around them and the consequences of their choices. The average Canadian produces more waste and uses more resources per capita than anyone else in the world. I am concerned about the wording of Demonstrate a deep understanding and care for the world around them by taking action to make the world a better place . How can you objectively and effectively assess a deep understanding ? This part is too subjective as my deep understanding is far different than others on our staff because of my personal experiences. What will the expectations of this look like? Are you asking all students to create community service projects or campaigns? Where will the resources for this come from with our already constrained budgets? I agree with other comments, stewardship for the environment needs to be stated somewhere in the documents. Could the Deep understanding objective be replaced with Stewardship goal.This suggestion is beyond the scope of the document, but it would be great if the stewardship component be a multi-stakeholder objective. This would include provisions for local community groups, municipal and provincial government and industry/ private sectors to assist in making change happen in the area. Education is more than just teachers working with students. The cliche phrase it takes a community to raise a child should be considered if we are looking at improving our environmental education and awareness I am happy that Alberta Ed is taking steps to bring our students more up to speed about the importance of the environment as we want produce one third of the world’s oil reserves.
I can answer a cuople of your questions. Distance learning (and I think this includes courses through the mail, as well) are courses you can do from your home, where the teacher is a fair distance from where the student is. There are some situations, where, for instance, a whole class might meet in one location, and the teacher is in another, sometimes with another group, and there are video and computer links. People take these classes to fulfill all sorts of requirements and interests, especially when they can’t GET to another location every week or two or three times a week to take a class. For instance, I once took a whole degree where I had to drive, daily, three hours each way to classes, spend all day, then come home, because I didn’t want to relocate altogether. I would MUCH rather have done the whole degree long-distance, but that wasn’t an option at the time. I live in a rural area, and getting advanced courses is often difficult, and all we have here is a community college, so, if I want an advanced class, I have to do something else, and that can be done through distance and online courses. I can’t help you out with any specifics. There are some good online Universities, but I’d be willing to bet there are some scams out there as well. Do your research and make sure you actually can TALK to someone who has taken courses through whatever group you want to send money to good luck!