Unfavorable influences of social media on Education

The number of people using social media has risen in the world today. The development in technology particularly smartphones and improvement in computers have made access to social media even more unrestricted. The majority of people who are using social media networks are teenagers in the school-going ages. Among the numerous social media networks that are always used by almost every student are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter among others. The use of social media in education can be split up into beneficial use where the students utilize them to carry out research and to share ideas. The unfavorable use of social media includes when it is used to share inappropriate content, social network obsession, and socializing. With the increasing use of social networks and expanding accessibility. Social media will continue to have considerable impacts on education.

This article discusses the social media challenges in the existing education system.

Unfavorable influences of Media on Education

The usage of social media in learning institutions has jeopardized the communications among the students and their teachers. Students are spending more of their time talking from behind a screen now. They are having a hard time communicating face to face with people. Social media has made students lose their communication skills that were very crucial in learning. The more time that the students are wasting communicating in social media, the less time they spend associating in person. Since communication in social media does not apply body signals and other non-verbal cues like inflection and intonation, social media communication cannot entirely replace face-to-face communication in learning institutions. The ability to express ideas in schools relied on communication skills.

The use of social media in communication has also occurred in the development of slang languages that the learners have embraced in their daily languages. This has endangered their ability to share academic ideas and the ability to write their examinations unaffected. The students are becoming increasingly incapable of communicating in person when they are used to social media communications.

The extent of the private information that can be served online and the facelessness the social media networks seem to provide has made many students forget the importance of analyzing what information they might use online. Some of the information that the students are posting online is compromising the quality of their education. Many academies and probable employers are going online to examine the networking profiles of the students before they could grant acceptance to interviews. The students might also make available information that might threaten the reputation of learning institutions. The learners are doing this not aware of the negative implications that their unanalyzed content on social media would have on the reputation of their academics and learning institutions.

Social media has also become the main distraction for students. This is affecting the across-the-board academic performance of these students. Social media has a greater obsession tendency making the students want to check what is happening online while they are active in their learning sessions. The recent's growth in technology and expansion of the Android technology has made access to social networks easier at any time of the day with just a single touch on the screen. This is becoming a problem because the students cannot concentrate on their studies. The learning institutions should establish measures that will prevent the use of social media in learning sessions. The use of social media has also deteriorated the capacity of students to conserve information.

The readiness of the students to spend time researching for helpful information has diminished with the expansion of social media. The products of education are graduates who are not as qualified as it used to be when the students were spending their looking for information that could benefit them academically. All this is happening because of the ease with which the students could access protected information on platforms where students and researchers share information. This has led to a decline in the need for researching because whatever information the students want to access can be found online. Before the beginning of social media technology, the students used hard copy materials for information that they wanted, and this facilitated the retention of information and the capacity to execute research. This has decreased with the expansion of social media.

The other unfavorable impact of social media networking is that it has changed attention from the pronunciation and grammar that has decreased. A lot of communication that happens online is defined by shortened forms of communication that are devised to make communication easy, and short to conserve time and energy. This tendency has been carried onward to class communication. Today, for a student to write an understandable piece work to disseminate academic ideas, they must depend on the computer's spell check feature to correct their grammar. This has restricted the amount and quality of information that can be shared by these learners The outcome of this is that in the future, unlike in the past where the researchers used to share their ideas with a particular level of articulateness, the future researcher will be hampered in the amount and quality of information that they exchange amongst themselves.

Although social media is used to improve learning for students through student communication, challenges are common when social media are integrated into the courses. The course educators inadvertently fail to procure the reserves or encouragement that is essential to support the use of social media in learning by inferring that the students are aware of and can agree to use particular sorts of social media. Even in the occurrences where social media is used for learning objectives, students integrate this technology into their lives in ways that vary from the intentions of the course teachers. For example, students may hold a non-academic debate simply because it is called a social media network.

This is a shred of evidence that when the social media is aspired to serve educational purposes, it ends up serving other schedules because of the mishandling by students, Social media is also a tough instructional technique to integrate because it looks to equalize the authority of the educator with the active participation of the students. To comprehend the full advantages of social media learning, the course instructor should adopt a constructivist approach where the students and course lecturers work together in learning.