Several years before, a Chinese internet expert has made a prediction that the internet world will be much powerful in the future with three steps. The first step is related to the web portals, internet users can watch the things which was produced by the editor of the web portals, just like Yahoo in the world. And then, it comes to the second step which is belonged to the web search tools, like Google and Bing. People can find what they want to see in the result of searching.Social network websites will play an important role in the third period of time. We can see the things we want to see just by clicking into these websites.
This prediction has became a truth today, the video posted on Youtube by Erik Qualman (Social Media Revolution 2011) showed us the stunned influence of the Social Network. It is 2013 now, the data in the video are still growing up everyday. Weibo and Wechat, two different tools of Social Network in China, both have over 300,000,000 users now. One thing interesting is that no one knows these two tools before 2009. The high speed of the growth of the amount of the users means an urgent need for users. The fact that we can communicate with all of our friends just by clicking several buttons is really cool!
The traditional idea of education was also challenged by this change, according to the video Educational Change Challenge (posted by Darren Cannell), we can find that joining into the social network and combining the traditional teaching method with the new elements has become challenges to educators.
Education is not as simple as teaching skills to others, it is also related to the society and culture. It is also relied on the communication between teachers and students. The world is changing, the educators also should change themselves in this trend.
As you have mentioned, as teachers we have to think carefully in order to decide whether traditional methods or Internet tools will work best for helping our students meet L2 learning standards. Sometimes traditional is the best choice, but sometimes the Internet lets us redesign some activities to be even more effective for learning.
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