Online Communities

of Learning/Social
Networking
 What is
SOCIAL
NETWORKING?
• IS A WEBSITE THAT ALLOWS PEOPLE WITH SIMILAR
INTERESTS TO COME TOGETHER AND SHARE INFORMATION,
PHOTOS AND VIDEOS.
• SOCIAL NETWORK TOOLS AFFORD STUDENTS AND
INSTITUTIONS WITH MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITIES TO
IMPROVE LEARNING METHODS. THROUGH
THESE NETWORKS, YOU CAN INCORPORATE SOCIAL MEDIA
PLUGINS THAT ENABLE SHARING AND INTERACTION
Social Networking
Platforms
FACEBOOK
 American company offering online social
networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004
by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin
Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were
students at Harvard University. Facebook became the
largest social network in the world, with more than one
billion users as of 2012, and about half that number
were using Facebook every day. The company’s
headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.
 FACEBOOK
 New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a
preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has
many components, including Timeline, a space on each
user’s profile page where users can post their content
and friends can post messages; Status, which enables
users to alert friends to their current location or situation;
and News Feed, which informs users of changes to their
friends’ profiles and status. Users can chat with each
other and send each other private messages. Users can
signal their approval of content on Facebook with the
Like button, a feature that also appears on many other
Web sites.
TWITTER
 Twitter began as an idea that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (@Jack) had in
2006. Dorsey had originally imagined Twitter as an SMS-
based communications platform. Groups of friends could keep tabs on what
each other were doing based on their status updates. Like texting, but not.
During a brainstorming session at the podcasting company Odeo, Dorsey
proposed this SMS-based platform to Odeo's co-founder Evan Williams (@Ev).
Evan and his co-founder Biz Stone (@Biz) by extension gave Jack the go-
ahead to spend more time on the project and develop it further.
 In its early days, Twitter was referred to as twttr. At the time, a popular trend,
sometimes to gain a domain-name advantage, was to drop vowels in the name
of their companies and services. Software developer Noah Glass (@Noah) is
credited with coming up with the original name twttr as well as its final
incarnation as Twitter.
TWITTER
The role of Twitter in learning is growing. This
social media improves communication between
professors and students and facilitates the
learning process. Twitter is to some extent the
future of education and this is the time for you to
become a part of this future. Use your existing
account or create one and communicate with
your teachers and with other students. Thus, you
will start learning in a more efficient and more
interesting way.