The number of people using social media networks has increased to above 2 billion in the world today. The development in technology especially smartphones and improvement in computers has made access to social media even more usable. The majority of people who are using social media networks are teenagers in the school-going ages. Among the many social media networks that are always used by almost every student are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram among others. The use of social media in education can be divided into beneficial use where the students employ them to carry out research and to share ideas. The negative use of social media includes when social media is used to share improper content, social networking addiction, and socializing. With the increasing use of social networks and the expanding of accessibility. Social media will continue to have important impacts on education. This article will discuss the social media challenge in the current education system.
Negative impacts of Social Media on Education
The usage of social media in learning institutions has jeopardized the communications amongst the students and students and their teachers. Hence, students are spending their time talking from behind a screen, they are having a tough time communicating face to face with people. Social media made a lot of students lose their communication skills, which are very important in learning. The more time the students are wasting communicating in social media, the less the time they spend socializing in person. Since communication in social media does not apply body signals and other nonverbal cues like intonation, inflection, social media communication cannot entirely replace the face to face communication in learning institutions. The ability to communicate understandings in schools relied on communication skills. The use of social media in communication has resulted in the development of lingo languages that the learners have adopted in their daily languages. This has endangered their ability to share academic ideas and their potential to write their examinations with fluency. The learners are becoming incapable of communication in person, But they are used to social media communications.
The grade of the private information that can be served online and the anonymity the social media networks seem to provide has made many students forget the significance of sorting what information they might use online. Some of the information that the learners are posting online is in many ways endangering the quality of their education. Many colleges and potential employers are going online to analyze the networking profiles if the learners before they could grant acceptance to consultations. The students might also make available information that might jeopardize the reputation of learning institutions. The students are doing this not aware of the negative implications that their undervalue content on social media would have on the reputation of their academics and learning institutions.
Social media has also become a dominant distraction for students. This is affecting the general academic performance of these students declines. Social media has a tremendous addiction inclination making the students want to check what is happening online while they are busy in their learning sessions. The modern,s growth in technology and expansion of the Android technology has made access to social networks even easier at any time of the day and with just a touch on the screen. This is becoming a huge problem because the students cannot concentrate pay attention to their studies. The learning institutions should, therefore, institute norms that will prohibit the use of social media in learning sessions.
The use of social media has also destroyed the ability of students to memorize information. The willingness of the students to spend time researching and looking up for beneficial information has lessened significantly with the proliferation of social media. The products of education in the modern day are graduates who are not as qualified as it used to be when the students were spending all their free time researching and looking for information that could help them academically. This is happening because of the ease with which the students can access classified information on social media and other networking platforms where students and researchers share information. This has led to the diminishing need for performing research because whatever information the learners want to access can be found online. Before the start of social media technology, the leamers used to persuade hard copy materials for information that they wanted, and this improved the retention of information and the ability to conduct research. This has decreased with the expansion of social media.
The other negative effect of social media networking technology is that it has switched attention from the pronunciation and grammar that has worsened drastically. A lot of communication that happens online is distinguished by shortened forms of communication that are composed to make communication easy, convenient, and short to save time and energy. This trend has been carried forward to class communication. Today, for a student to write a readable piece of work to communicate academic ideas, they must depend on the computer’s spell check feature to correct their grammar. This has limited the amount and quality of information that can be shared by these learners. The effect of this is that in the future, unlike in the past where the researchers used to share their ideas with a certain level of articulateness, the future researcher will be limited in the amount and quality of information that they exchange amongst themselves.
Although social media is used to enhance learning for students through student interactions, challenges are accepted when social media are involved in the courses. The course educators inadvertently fail to provide the resources or encouragement, that is necessary to support the use of social media in learning by assuming that the students are aware and can agree to use certain types of social media. Even in situations where social media is used for learning purposes, students integrate this technology into their lives in ways that differ from the intentions of the course teachers. For instance, students may hold non-academic debate simply because it is called a social media network. This is proof that when social media is intended to serve educational purposes, it ends up sewing other plans because of the misuse by students. Social media is also a difficult instructional strategy to incorporate because it looks to balance the authority of the educator with the active participation of the learners. To realize the full benefits of social media learning, the course professor must adopt a constructivist approach where the learners and course instructors work together in learning.
#
You can check out The possible solutions to the negative impact of social media on education on the link below
You really give it a thought