Social Media and Education

Our people have already witnessed three explosions, viz., Atomic Explosion, Population Explosion, and Information (Technology) Explosion. Now, comes the fourth one, “SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION”.

Every ethical and professional expert is encountering with variety of attacks from his or her team members who are influenced by Social Media. A company director is unable to retain an employee; institutions loose even the subject matter experts and teachers because of their immoral influences through various social media misadventures; teachers find very difficult to control their class students who are always entangled to smartphones; spouses are struggling and separations occur more frequently because of misuse and overuse of social media.

Our students may write one day on the answersheet that if anyone has liked this answer do not forget to click the bell button!!

Everyone wants them to be liked by the whole world without knowing the underlying principle of their life as described in Theory of Everything!! The Biggest of big things and the Smallest of the small things behave alike!!

Anor anian Mahatho Mahiyaan

Bhagavat Gita

Every single fundamental particle is significant and it has its role either to generate or operate or destroy the assigned target in the Universe. Everyone in this world is the Greatest but the role given to everyone is unique!

No two electrons look alike!! Every electron is unique and is identified by its ID, the Quantum Number!!

Pauli Exclusion Principle

So, when everyone is so important to the society, should we need to wander for a pompous popularity? We should never surrender to ego eventhough we are surrounded by ego-inflators.

Sri Krishna lead great war, The Mahabharatha and made Pandavas win the battle, but was destined to death in the hands of a hunter!!

This world is so funny! Someone calls it Maya or illusion! Others may call Nature!!

Like what you do! Don’t do what you like!

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Let us like what we do and do not do whatever we like, because we are dictated by many wrong influences and external stimuli around us causing desire and danger.

தனி மரம் தோப்பாகாது!

Tamil Proverb – A single tree does not make an orchard.

Somebody prompts this Tamil proverb. Agreed! Overdoing is not fair.

Everyone is worried of too much uses of social media. Nobody demands to boycott social media.

We strongly recommend Social Media in Education to promote students’ creative learning ideas like concept maps, sketch notes, mind maps, topic trees, infographics, video presentations etch. Every online content can be created naturally with their own hands, pens, pencils and students should not be encouraged to copy paste like copy cats as most of the schools do in the name projects and power points. This bad practice started at the school level leads to plagiarism in PhD even in reputed University.

Reputation cannot be achieved by Repetition; it can be achieved only by innovation. That is the basic requirement of a Ph.D. Scholar!!

E. Ramanathn

I claim that I have coined these terms!! But who knows, someone might have also stated the same wordings!!

Now, let me declare that we strongly condemn the inclusion of social media in education. Let me explain why.

I have directed many years ago some animated educational contents and had been proud of the elearning advantages and claimed that “Our product can replace a real teacher in the classroom by our virtual teacher” , but later understood that no elearning content can match a good teacher with the following great mentoring qualities.

Can you believe any social media or any elearning tool satisfy all these together? I wonder why these schools and some school teachers have the wrong tendency of forming groups and sending questions, assignments and notes through social media when plenty of time is available during school hours. Instead of creating tensions by sending questions and problems, the school teachers can promote their students’ original creations of educational contents. Should you invite 2D artist, 3D designer, sound engineer, machine learning experts, all these hi-fi guys to add on more values for a simple reaction, magnesium burns in air to become magnesium dioxide. The hi-fi gang creates a 3D arrow starting from Mg on firing on a big stove and producing splashing the entire lab with a white light in order to engage the student. But, our poor fellow will write magnesium oxide is prepared by keeping magnesium on a pan kept on stove and white light is produced on firing. Will any sane chemistry teacher provide marks for this answer without key words and equations? If a teacher wants everthing to visualize on screen, he or she damages the imagination of the student. Our students have already been reading Maths and Physical text books also like News Papers. We make them further lazy by encouraging stimulating animations and distracting videos.

Promote the Students’ Hand Made Creative Learning Stuff in the Social Media and encourage the parents to view and invite them to give votes and comments. That is the positive attitude. It developes competitive spirit among students. Parents should also avoid wasting time in forwarding useless messages, images, gifs, and videos. Let them pass on their wards’ creative academic work in their friends social network.

If you have any creative educational contents done by your sons or daughters with their own hand, we are pleased to post yours wards’ great contents and make you proud even your school fails and ignores!