16 Dabbagh and Kitsantas “Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self
16 Dabbagh and Kitsantas “Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning”
Reference
Background
A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is potentially promising to:
- integrate formal and informal learning using social media and to support self-regulated learning for students in higher educational contexts;
- conceptionally connect the PLE to social media and to self-regulated learning, and
- to provide the three-level pedagogical structure for the use of social media to generate PLEs that promote self-regulated learning.
The objective of this study is to evaluate studies that promotes that statement. Implications are given in this field for potential studies.
Learners can are active co-producers of content. They seek information to address a problem at work, school, or just satisfy a curiosity. To do so, they take advantage of digital and networked technologies not only to seek information, but also to share information. Additionally, learning in the context of social media has become highly self-motivated, autonomous, and informal, as well as an integral part of the college experience (McGloughlin & Lee, 2010).
Current higher education institutions focus more on traditional ways of teaching, such as course and learning management system. Most of the institutions did not pay much attention on pedagogical strategies such as applying social media and social networks to give learners the opportunities to create a better learning environment. This learning environment can help learners build connections and create their learning activities with peers.
Previous studies have demonstrated that social media plays the functions of assisting the formation of PLEs, helping learners share learning progress with peers, contributing collective knowledge generation, and working with their own meaning making.
The purpose of this study mainly focuses on how instructors use PLE to create a platform for informal and formal learning. In addition, this learning environments can be beneficial for self-regulated learning in higher education. The authors mentioned three aspects of the purpose of this study: (a) examine studies that support the statement and provide implications for future research; (b) explore connections between social media, PLE, and self-regulated learning, and (c) use three-level pedagogical framework to explain how social media can be applied to support self-regulated learning in in PLE.
The number of students who use social media has increased dramatically from 2007 to 2010, and the gap between younger students and aging adults use of social media has decreased (Smith & Caruso, 2010). According to the report from Educause Learning Initiative, Social media has been widely used in teaching and learning in four year colleges. In the classroom, some instructors used WordPress for portfolio development, Twitter for classroom conversations, and wiki software for coll