The Future of Education

The focus of this research was to explore how social media and Web 2.0 could be used to enhance the face-to-face teaching and learning process. Action research was used to design learning that valued the students own experiences and used the attributes of social media to encourage students to create, connect and form a partnership in the learning process; hence supporting students' strengths and abilities. This paper will explore three focus areas:
1. The needs of teachers when redesigning curriculum.
2. Enabling students to use their experiences in the teaching and learning process while valuing them as participants.
3. The development of appropriate scaffolding to ensure that active student learning takes place; learning which supports multimodal methods and the new literacies evolving in our world today.

This was a qualitative study investigating emergence, connections and designs for learning. The connections now being made, outside the classroom, with social media and learning, demonstrate that what it means to teach and learn is changing. The researcher combined Graham Nuthall's (2007) "lens on learning" to help her conceptualise and analyse data while making links to chaos and complexity theories. The researcher is a PhD student and was also the classroom teacher in an Australian public high school. She used Armstrong and Moore's (2004, p. 13) framework of the action research spiral and collected data over an 18 month period during 2010 and 2011. The data came from the teacher/researcher's twelve high school classes which she taught during that time.

To monitor and participate in the use of social media required an increase in the teacher's work time. As a partial counter-balance, it was found that the teacher/researcher successfully reduced her time spent on correction by implementing peer and self-assessment and by making more effective use of classroom observations. This led to a valuable triangulation of assessment data. Reviewing many of the screen clips collected in this study, one can see the diversity of roles and activities in which the students engaged and their development over time through the action research cycle. By combining Web 2.0, face-to-face teaching and social media, where students made online friends and used pseudonyms, provided students with more choices and flexibility when working, communicating and learning.

This research may help curriculum developers interweave new technologies, new literacies and multimodal learning methods into day-to-day learning programs. The methods of learning and designs developed should also be transferable to other educational learning environments.