Education Commons^™

Does Social Media Breed Learner Laziness?, Shelley Kinash, Jeffrey Brand

Jeffrey Brand

Extract As new technologies grow in popularity, the associated cognitive and moral worries, concerns and questions intensify. The current devices of choice are smartphones, tablets and laptops. People primarily use them for texting, social media and massive multi-player online games. Parents and teachers are concerned, asking questions such as: are people losing the ability to [offline] socialise; is the current technology too addictive, in that children need to be forced to pick up a book or go play outside; is abbreviated and phonetic messaging interfering with people’s spelling and grammatical skills.

Networking Young Citizens : Learning To Be Citizens In And With The Social Web, Suzanne Mellor, Terri Seddon

Suzanne Mellor

Many claims are made, both in the popular press and the professional education literature, about the significance of the social web in enabling civic participation. However empirical evidence supporting these claims is sparse and contested rather than strongly-indicative. The Monash University pilot research project, Networking Young Citizens, relates to the discussion about the ways in which the social web might support the civic participation, especially of young people, by examining the ways in which Web 2.0 was integrated into teaching and learning in the school, and any other processes of civic socialisation that were consciously adopted in three schools.

This …