The Future of Education

The world is moving faster, can education keep up with all those changes? Universities needs to take into account students habits, to meet students in the environment they are activating, and use it in their purpose. How can Universities make capital out of this social force for learning while attending to some persistent concerns? More and more teachers and universities are attempting to leverage the qualities of social media for use in the classroom and even more, they are trying to use it to connect teachers, students and parents in a way they couldn’t achieve before. Social media is where students live, it’s part of their digital footprint, it’s not just where their friends are, it’s where they want their teacher to be and to be able to learn.

This paper explores the impact of social media on education within the Department for Distance Learning, University of Bucharest, Romania. The Department started the activity 15 years ago and the main focus was on designing, implementing and development of the distance learning system of education within University of Bucharest. One particular aspect of the Department for Distance Learning activity, during these 15 years, was the continuous adaptation to new technologies in order to support the specific distance learning. Ad-hoc surveys, performed by the authors, revealed the following facts: ALL the students have electronic equipment (terminals) with Internet connection; ALL the students declare they spend many hours per week on social networks (Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube etc.). Teenagers are tweeting, posting, LIKEing, SHAREing and commenting all across social media and it doesn’t seems to be an end of it.

From our experience with students, Google Blogger is an incredibly efficient tool that allows students and teachers to build relationships, engage in reflective practice. A blog is a timely source of information and that’s one of the reasons why a large number of students of Department for Distance Learning have interests in learning to build their own blog or they are active members on a school blog.

After spending many hours on the Internet reading specialized literature the authors realized that in the last years the number of people that own a Facebook / Google Plus account or a Blog has increased, so now we are witnessing a Boom of social media in education and teachers MUST keep up with all this powerful tools that new technologies provides us.