ROAD OF LEARNING

It seems to me that learning has changed a lot from the past to present and who knows it may change in the future as it is really difficult to predict the future. It’s even difficult to predict what will happen in the next minute.Most of you may know that a U.S Mayor after seeing the demonstration of the telephone in 1880 declared that one day every town in America will have a telephone. As this happened then that day the whole America’s future had changed. That’s why I said that it is difficult to predict the future. So this becomes a
problem to the teachers to prepare the students for the future that which can’t be described clearly.






TYPES OF LEARNING:

Basically there are two types of learning. They are:
(1)Formal Learning and
(2)Informal Learning
The names of the learning itself gives you an idea on what basis the learning is classified. As per one survey it seems that about 80% of people prefer informal learning and only 20% do formal learning. It’s kind of surprising right..? Even I was feeling the same but what can I do other than believing those surveys. First of all I have a question for you, is learning only about gaining knowledge or to score good marks or about making connections or something else. What do you feel..? What I feel is learning is not about a period of

time or about making connections and so on, but it’s a mixture of all these aspects. Do you know what Don Tapscott said? He said that “It’s not what you know that counts anymore. It’s what you can learn”. I think the same applies to everyone because if you can learn the particular theory then you have fair chances to know that theory too.

SOURCES OF LEARNING:

I have one more query to you, can we categorize the learners? Categorizing the learners based on the source of learning is foolish but we can categorize the learners based on the grasping power of the learners
like fast learner and so on. Teachers expect every student to perform well but that can’t happen as expectations are not the same as needs. In my opinion if teachers could teach something it would be better if they concentrate on how to increase the grasping power of every student rather than telling some non-sense.

Coming to the sources of learning, at this moment we have different sources of learning and one among them is the INTERNET. One important aspect which I wanted to convey to the society is learners enjoy learning when it’s engaging and fun. So, education system must be re-sculptured in a way where learning is through engaging, fun, serious games, role play simulation and so on. We can learn through social networking, privacy maintenance, identity management, creating content, organizing content, reusing and
re-purposing, filtering and selecting, self broad-castings and so on.

There are some Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), which are not only personal web tools and personal learning networks. PLEs are much wider than this, taking in experiences, as well as learning
through TV, music, paper based materials, radio & more formal contexts. Now we even
have some intuitive handheld devices such as I-pad and so on, where you can connect to your
learning network.

COMMUNICATION



Communication is the major aspect of learning now-a-days. I feel that if you know how to communicate you can learn many things like if you are with a group of friends, you can talk to them and gain some knowledge about something which your friend knows and you can even share yours too. So, other people
become the surrogate for knowledge.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is the other major aspect of learning. This social media gives everyone a voice in the community and also the wisdom of the crowd, common interest and your opinion can be shared. Here are some figures of the social media use:

1.Facebook-500 million

2.Twitter-100 million

3.Wikipedia-14 million articles

4.Flickr-4 billion images

5.Youtube-2 billion views per day

6.Myspace-125 million

7.Linked in-50 million

ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Actually how this social media works, firstly the user develops the content which is read by various people where the knowledge is shared. One such thing is the blog, and most of you may be familiar with the words of Daniel Chandler on blogging that “In the act of writing, we are written”. Now we can even blog through
our mobiles which takes blogging on the move to capture images, sounds and experiences.And there’s also micro blogging which is twitter where re-tweeting is not repetition but it’s amplification as said by Steve Wheeler. If we see micro blogging as a communication channel, it really has potential for the future of learning. There’s even media sharing where we all can contribute to the richness of the
narrative and share audio, video and images.

COMPUTERS

We can use computers to extend the capabilities of our own minds. They can become the repositories of our knowledge.So, we can use computers as our mind tools. As we live in a techno-social world learning
occurs inside and outside of people – we store our knowledge in computers and in other people as said by George Siemens.And for the connectivity to internet too we need computers. So, we can even say that computers took the learning level much higher.