Challenges of interactive learning environments and user-generated contents in education
Előadó: Zoltán Zakota
Szerző bemutatkozása:
The author is actually lecturer at the Partium Christian University in Oradea, Romania, lecturing Economics and ICT. He also teaches Finances at the Hunfalvy Bilingual Secondary Vocational School in Budapest. His fields of interest are higher education, the role of ICT in education and regional studies, with special regard on the Hungarian-Romanian border zone.
Előadás absztrakt:
In the last decades, emerging technologies have become more and more integrated into our everyday lives. People use information and communication technologies frequently to connect with each other, and the Internet has an overwhelming role in leveraging this process. The Internet can be used inter alia for communication (talking, messaging), creating and operating online social networks and groups, and collaboratively edited content and knowledge. With its versatile usability, the Internet has opened up new opportunities for communication and cooperation and has made it possible to spread the interaction between people. Social Media is a new media based on community activity and features: participation, openness, encouragement for activity, connections, communication, and community formation. The new global students’ networks features are: learners are better prepared for life and work, classrooms are more attractive, learners are responsible for their own learning, education is more personal, adults perform better in their work and develop their problem solving skills, learners are more precious, and schools save time and money. Nowadays, children are closely linked to their technology and students tend to think to be more familiar with networks, but they may not necessarily use them for learning purposes. In addition to providing students with spontaneous learning and knowledge-sharing teams, learners need their teachers to show how their networks can be utilized and nurtured more effectively for learning purposes. Access to knowledge presupposes primarily acquiring knowledge through personal student networks. Learning is still a social activity, but the web offers more opportunities for common, experimental, exploratory and knowledge-based learning than personal learning situations. Online student networks are of the utmost importance in the formation and cooperation of learning communities. Collaborations also bring benefits such as effective filtering of information flows, common knowledge, problem solving, and task execution. My paper aims to present the growing role of Web 2.0 based student-networks in acquiring and spreading knowledge between them, the specificities of these contents and differences they introduced into the learning process in opposition to the “classical ways” of learning.
