My reaction...

Actually, the talk that was given by Prof. Richard Cameron last Thursday was interesting, informative, and meaningful. It was about social networking and its impact on teaching and learning process. To a large extent, social network is largely used among the younger generations such as chat on line, blogs and so on.., but the thing that was new to me and attractive my attention!! was how to apply all of these social technologies as a helpful method in education system.As well as during the lecture Prof. Richard Cameron linked the previous concept to the using Web 2.0 Paradigm to design an online academic research and learning community. Actually, he illustrated clearly the differences between "Web 2.0" and "Web 1.0" and the advantages by using "Web2.0".In terms of social networking types I can say that there are other ones besides facebook, Friendster, MySpace, and tagged, which are Cyworld, Bebo, Second life, Neing, Orkut, Hi5, Twitter, Multiply and Flixter, bulletin board and forum. Absolutely, I agree with Farah that before thinking of how such technology enhance teaching and learning and adapt it in the classroom setting, we should bear in mind if the learners are IT literate or not. In my opinion, we have to work on this area first.In my point of view, the usage of social networking could be implemented to facilitate language learning and teaching. For example, as we do right now in this forum as all the students' writing will be published in the bulletin board and everybody could see it. So they will be more careful about their writing in order to capture their lecturers' and friends' attention, as a result this will help them in developing their writing skills. To sum up, my reaction on that lecture is that I think it was a good chance to meet people from another country and different culture to exchange the knowledge. What is your opinion?
Mufida Ali Ghwela. P48346