Most likely you are already taking advantage of these ‘new’ social media networks. Whether you are socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter or just adding a new bookmark to Digg or ZoomIt Canada, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. The next step is to integrate these tools into a new form of learning, or upgrading to Learning 2.0.

Social media tools are providing teachers with so many more opportunities to improve student engagement in learning.  From blogs and wikis, where people are sharing how they approach all sorts of information, to the use of new teaching tools to help teachers to implement social learning in their classrooms.

How Social Learning Is Being Used Today

Social learning is based on the premise that a better understanding of the subject matter can be had when learning is constructed through conversations and interactions with others. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning. Many colleges and universities are already implementing social learning in their teaching methods.

Below are five examples of how social media is currently being used by teachers today:

1) Collaborative Learning

There are many social media sites out there that deal with collaborative learning. The Hands-On Universe is based at the University of California and is a collaborative learning project in astronomy. Students request observations from professional observatories that will provide them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists. The Faulkes Telescope Project provides students in the United Kingdom with free access to two high-powered robotic telescopes, one in Hawaii and the other in Australia, which the students are able to use remotely to carry out their own scientific investigations and supports collaborative projects between students and expert astronomers.

2) Open Educational Resources

One of the earliest examples of the impact of social learning has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. OER began in 2001 when MIT provided open access to materials and modules from more than 1,700 of their courses. MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities to join the OER movement and contribute their own open educational resources.

3) Online Video

Online video has been used to present live and taped lectures to students for quite some time now. Michael Wesch, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, has taken online video further by incorporating the social aspect of it. His videos The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today, which is a video that summarizes how students learn today, can be found on video social networking sites like YouTube.com.

4) Virtual Learning

Second Life is an online virtual world that has attracted millions of users and many schools are now using Second Life to teach their courses. Two of the most notable schools to recently host classes in Second Life are the University of Southern Queensland with their Terra Incognita project and Harvard Law School with their course called CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion. The Terra Incognita project not only supports lecture-style teaching, but in true social learning style students also have the ability to break off into smaller groups which instructors can visit or send messages to. Harvard’s CyberOne course was not only offered to students enrolled in Harvard Law School, who were able to attend the class in person, but also non-law school students attending Harvard, and even any member Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost.

5) Public Blogs

Many teachers are not only using public blogs to communicate with their students but they are also being used as part of the course curriculum. Walter Carl at Northeastern University uses blogs to teach students about viral marketing. While Toby Bloomberg, of the University of Delaware, has added her own personal blog to the assigned reading list for her class. David Wiley at Utah State University took it a step further by requesting that all student writing was required to be completed on public blogs.

If Learning 2.0 becomes compulsory, new graduates are no longer going to view social media as a challenge when entering the workforce. Rather, the end result is going to be a wide range of young professionals entering the business world with new tricks up their sleeve.

Eclectic Homeschooling – This type of homeschooling works under the philosophy that you should enhance your child’s everyday activities and emotions, using them to insert appropriate lessons to teach them a subject.

Classical Homeschooling – This is a method of learning that goes all the way back to the middle ages. It works on the philosophy that the younger children begin with learning the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Once that’s mastered, they move on to the next stage, which consists of grammar. It involves compositions and collections.

Then they move to the dialect stage, where the serious study of reading and writing and arithmetic comes in. Instead of learning grade-appropriate materials that public schools use, the child learns in stages.

The Charlotte-Mason Method – This is one of the most popular methods of homeschooling today. Charlotte-Mason developed this style to enrich a child’s education through nature, literature and real life experiences.

Although a child must still be taught with a regular curriculum according to your state’s laws, they can learn to love learning with nature lessons, poetry understanding and much more. When learning is more enlightening for a child, they’re more apt to absorb the information then when they’re given a bunch of facts to memorize.

Montessori-at-Home – This type of homeschooling allows a child to learn their fundamentals through the use of their environment and by using all of their senses – not by memorizing facts from a textbook.

Montessori is a woman who studied children for many years and developed the philosophy that one should control the environment and not the child when teaching them skills.

The Moore Formula – This method is divided into three separate parts. It’s a way of teaching with studying for a determined amount of time each day based on the child’s needs.

It involves manual work and entrepreneurship, which teaches a child to accept responsibility. Lastly, it involves home or community service, which builds character within the child.

The Reggio Emilia Approach – This method teaches preschool-aged children to learn through exploration and not by having the fundamentals forced on them. It teaches that children have a built-in sense that allows them to learn what they need in this world at their own pace.

The Structured Homeschooling Approach – This is a method of homeschooling that is similar to the curriculum seen in public schools. This approach teaches lessons at a grade level depending on the student’s age and where they are at in their academics.

The Unit Study Approach – This approach to homeschooling allows a child to learn a subject as a whole instead of just reading chapters in a textbook. A child learns a subject through use of reading, science, math and other methods to learn that topic. Children can retain almost 50% more than the traditional study techniques applied in public schools.

Unschooling – This is a more laid back form of educating your child. Basically, your son or daughter will lead you in their educational needs. You’ll discover what to teach them based on their own interests and goals, not by abiding by a strict curriculum.

Waldorf Homeschooling – This method works on the philosophy of teaching through use of spirit, soul and body. The method teaches that the child will best learn by exploring their environment.

By analyzing your child’s learning abilities and your comfort-level with each type of instruction, you’ll be able to find a method of homeschooling that fulfills both you and your child during the educational journey the two of you take together.

With these techniques you will be able to find out exactly what you want in life and learn the skills that will enable you to achieve that outcome. You can learn to communicate more effectively and become extremely successful in both business and personal life.

The skills learned will the doors to hidden resources, improves your ability to concentrate, your ability to learn and paves the way for many new possibilities.

By using these techniques you can change your behaviour positively and you will learn to handle negative situations more effectively and reduce stress, anxiety and depression.

NLP was developed in the early 1970’s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They discovered methods to find the difference between somebody that excels at a given skill and somebody that is merely average at the same skill.

The named this process the ‘modelling’ and it was the foundation of the body of knowledge that became Neuro Linguistic Programming.

NLP techniques can help improve your life in the following areas:

1. Personal development – people who want to take charge of their lives can greatly enhance their physical and emotional well being by using NLP techniques.
2. Personal counselling – problems such as allergies, phobias, snoring and even habits can be relieved by using these techniques. These sessions are usually brief but very successful.
3. Family counselling – problems within families between husband and wife, or parents and children, can often be resolved by improving the quality of communication between family members.
4. Education – NLP techniques can be used to effectively increase learning and education.
5. Business – many organisations use the techniques to teach their employees how to function at a higher level of performance.
6. Sports – excellence in sports is a state of mind and sportsmen cannot perform at their best unless they are in the right mental state. NLP techniques can benefit greatly in improving sports performance.

NLP works on the basis that anyone can do anything they want. When you know what your dream is you need to set an outcome and work toward achieving that outcome. The techniques will teach you the techniques to be able to achieve that outcome and not give up along the way.

Neuro Linguistic Programming can improve your life greatly and if you are looking at changing your life for the better then it is well worth giving it a go.