It's no surprise that high school and college students spend a bulk of their time texting and tweeting. But who would have thought that social media would make its way into the classroom -- as an invited guest, no less?
 
Developing community
Forget the "no cell phones rule" -- these days, laptops and iPhones are a mainstay of the classroom. In the most cutting-edge courses, following classmates on Twitter or friending each other on Facebook is mandatory. Through these social media, you can chat about classes and life in between, which enables you to connect with your classmates in a broader sense than you would in a traditional group project setting. And when you connect with your peers on a personal level, it leads to higher engagement in the class and the subject matter itself.

Increasing participation
When you have a class just two or three times a week, the subject matter may not have sufficient opportunity to weed its way into your stream of consciousness. But when you receive your classmates' and professors' relevant tweets and status updates, the topics stay on your radar screen and prompt off-the-cuff thoughts and ideas. You communicate those snippets with others, who in turn contribute their own ideas, until you've created a collective brainstorm. This consistent, real-time interaction begets true intellectual community.

Facilitating information delivery
Rather than paging through an outdated book, you can follow or friend professionals with specific expertise to get questions answered or just learn more about their work. On Twitter, you can monitor keywords to find out how people use a particular word, or you can track an event, a proper name, a movie, and so on. You can even map user posts to find out where in the world certain topics are being discussed. Or you can use a Twitter poll to collect and graph opinions about a controversial issue. And all these tweets and posts can be automatically sent to your iPhone, which means you get information when you're waiting in line, watching TV, or working out.

Fostering creativity
Technology also paves the way for creative, engaging academic assignments. Professors might ask you to produce a tweet dialogue between characters about a key issue in order to practice taking the role of another. Classes can create tweetstories, in which each student contributes a tweet to form a coherent story. On Facebook, you can create new profiles for fictional or historical characters and post items of interest on each other's walls. Social media technology provides the platform for creatively engaging in academic material and promoting active learning.

Despite what you may have thought, technology doesn't hinder learning -- it fuels it.

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