Social Networking, Teaching, and Learning: Introduction to Special Section on Social Networking, Teaching, and Learning (SNTL)

Abstract

Today’s students and educators live in the world of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube. These and many other social networking and social media applications are part of the so-called Social Web (i.e., Web 2.0), best characterised by the notions of social interaction, content sharing, and collective intelligence. In addition, today’s students, often referred to as digital natives (Prensky, 2001), have spent most of their time on computers, game consoles, digital music players, video cameras, cell phones, as well as the Web itself. Being used to constant engagement and multitasking in their day-to-day activities, students need a high level of social and creative engagement in learning. Traditional teaching approaches favouring passive content consumption, therefore, are no longer applicable and have to be substituted, or at least complemented, with highly interactive learning processes.