Education using New Media

♥The Author


Fiona

Temasek Business School; year 2
Business Information Technology


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Monday, December 28, 2009, 10:14 PM

With the fast changing technologies, it is not surprising that the education system now differ from the past. New Media are used in today’s education system such as E-learning platform, forums, games etc.

Personal Experience:
I believe many of us had experiences with e-learning. Well, I had too.
But one particular e-learning that I encounter was to download a game called Second Life, create an account, and dressed our avatar. That sounded cool to those gamers, and to those non-gamers we just felt that it was wasting our time. During our E-learning time slots, we were supposed to log-on to the game and meet the lecturer inside the game. Wow, lecturer played games too? Actually, they were just inside the game to facilitate us. We had to enter the so called class-room and answer some questions, there-after we will be given a password to key in, in order to proceed to the lecture theatre whereby there are many poster with information pinned up on the wall for us to read.

I feel that this e-learning method is good in a way that it arouses the interest of the students as they seldom gets to experience learning using games.

Impact of New Media on student:
In the past, classrooms are the place where students get to learn more about their subjects. However, with new media, students do not necessarily need to be physically present in the classroom to be able to acquire more knowledge.

In the past, students doing their research have to make a trip down to the library (Time consuming) and browse through those books available and sometimes can’t even find the information needed. However, this problem is not likely to occur with the help of new media; students can now easily access to the many search engines available and just key in the search queries they want and they will be presented with few thousands/millions of results. They can now gather a huge amount of information in the comfort of their own home and within few clicks.

In the past, teachers will be standing in-front of the classroom to conduct their lesson and it gets worse if the teachers talks in a monotone way. Luckily, with new media it enables teachers to make use of vodcast (youtube) or podcast to carry out their lessons. I believe students will not get bored from the vodcast and thus, enhancing their concentration level.

New Media enables online submission facilities, where student can submit their homework/assignments through the Internet. Moreover, students can also interact with their teachers over the web such as, through MSN or E-mails. Lastly, students are also able to gather additional information they needed to enhance their knowledge base.

Advantages and Disadvantages of New Media in education:

Advantages-
  1. The making of announcements using New Media is efficient, as compared to the traditional methods of making announcements in lectures or pinning up notices. Hence, the announcements can be viewed at any time of the day through the Internet, makes it increasingly convenient.

  2. With new media, it also allows students to undertake group work where they can carry out a discussion with a lot less hassle than the traditional method of repeated meetings which are hard to organize within a group of busy people.

  3. Allows students to learn and work at their own pace without any time restrictions.

  4. Allows students to have the flexibility to schedule their time around families, jobs and other activities because students have access to learning materials at anytime, anywhere.

Disadvantages-

  1. Students without home access to the Internet may be disadvantaged by the limited use of the medium to do their research.

  2. Although the Internet provides a huge amount of information, but the excessive amount make it difficult to locate which are the more reliable source.

  3. Not all are able to communicate effectively through chats and discussion forum. Misunderstanding occurs.

  4. Technical failure may occur, which causes delay to student’s learning.
New media in the educational field has made the process of learning and knowledge sharing an interactive and fun-filled activity.

What will the future of the education system be like? Will there still be physical space for students to attend their classes or they will just sit in-front of the computer screen and attend their lesson with the use of web-cams at home?
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