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7PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES | ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКИЕ НАУКИ
TRADINNOVATIVE PRACTICES IN THE EDUCATION OF FU-TURE TEACHERS
Georgieva V.
Faculty of education, Trakia university, Stara Zagora, assist. prof.
ABSTRACT
The article refers to the pedagogical "New Age", outlines the evolution of communication, shows one of the modern trends and challenges in the evolution of the contemporary education - the phenomenon of social media and its essence and classifications. The article is also about the bulgarian students who are future educators and shows the tradinnovative good practice such as including social media in their curriculum.
Keywords: social media, facebook, education, socialization, tradinnovation
INTRODUCTION
In the past ages the elemental socialization and symbiotic transmission of the natural experience for human survival take place in the limits of the family only. Later this myopic range opens up new social horizons through the appearance of the markets where people exchange goods but also information and ideas, enriching their knowledge and experience by each other. Soon after, the lines of social space continue to expand communication in the churches and festive events where people satisfy their congenital human desire for companionship. The isomorphic nature of these social boundaries begins to fade and inspires deeply by the appearance of printing, newspapers and contribution of radio and television for the transfer of ideas among a very large number of people. To reach more distant social dimensions the mankind develops the knowledge and the science in 1991 by creating Internet. Four years later appear the first social media and today they are the grandiose "Roller Coster" which some people associate with fascinating and irreplaceable emotions, and in others it creates feelings of insecurity, fear and reluctance, mainly driven by limited preliminary convictions. Such dispositions seemed to remain secondary to the colossal dimensions of the phenomenon of "social media", which displaces sustainable layers of the communication known so far and actually implemented fundamental metamorphosis of interaction and socialization of the people in the XXI century. Today it is not particularly surprising that social media are an area where the social subjects continuously communicate actively and they could declare themselves in parallel, showing their family status, lifestyle, they also can learn, facilitate job searching, use the chances of profitable buying goods and services, saving time and energy, also to make bank transactions and any other serious and entertainment activities. In these fields the new Homo Socialis can easily flirt, demonstrate sympathy, indifference or antipathy, he can appeal his spiritual longings and can be able to share his social success, mood and emotions ... daily. Social media are a new irreplaceable part permanently housed in the daily life of contemporary and characterize its everyday culture. These new media are a temporal problem in the "New age", which exceed the prerogatives of technology and impact directly on the personality and its socialization.
SOCIAL MEDIA - ESSENCE
The term social media originates from two words "social" (from Latin. socialis - public, related to people's lives in society) and "media" (from Latin. medius - middle, between). The term "social media" can be found in the literature as "new media", "interactive media", "digital media". J. Kietzmann and K. Hermekens [1, p. 241-251] explain social media as dependent on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, create together, discuss and change content. There have been many definitions of the concept social media in recent years and new ones continue to be given. All these definitions give reason to the author to shape his definition of social media -any digital and virtual platform bringing together the three components in itself - technology, real users and the possibility of instant interaction between them. The social media depends on technologies used by real people from around the world (regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, age) and engaging each other socially and emotionally by generating content and reacting to a content generated by the other real people (photos, songs, videos, posts).
SOCIAL MEDIA - CLASSIFICATION
According to A. Kaplan and M. Haenlein [2, p. 59-68] there are 6 different social media types:
- collaborative projects (like Wikipedia);
- blogs and microblogs (like Twitter);
- content communities (like YouTube, DailyMotion);
- social networking sites (like Facebook);
- virtual game-worlds (like World of Warcraft);
- virtual social worlds (like Second Life).
In the last five years there are other tries for social media classifications, which are generalized by T. Aichner and F. Jacob [3, p. 257-275] for the last in 2015 - blogs, microblogs, corporative social networks, forums, business networks, sites for photo sharing, sites for products and services review, sites for games, social network sites, sites for video sharing and virtual worlds. It is obvious that the limits and frames between the different types of social media are not very clearly and steadily differentiated. There are debates regarding blogs and different social platforms. The authors cogently support their arguments, but the question is open for the time being. It is of no such great significance in which subgroup of social media each of them would be categorized. The diversity of social media is
too abundant and holds a progressing tendency with regards to quantity due to the emergence of new and more attractive platforms and loss of interest in long used ones. But the more important thing is to know social media, to know how to use them safely, constructively and creatively - mankind to be able to assist people in using social media and its opportunities for their needs and not the opposite.
"SOCIAL MEDIA IN EDUCATION" AS A DISCIPLINARY OF PEDA-GOGICAL SPECIALITIES STUDENTS
The evolution of the technologies and cross-scientific topical needs results in realizing and applying the theory of the important symbiosis between tradition and new technologies in practice by so called "tradinnovative" practice [4, p. 21-23]. This is the main philosophy in the disciplinary "Social media in education" for students future teachers. While the course the students interiorize the material by the didactic traditions and topical social platforms together. The exteriorization of the knowledge by the learners follows the same way.
Summarize the intent of the course is aimed at preventing the risk of the chance social media to become a substitute of human possibilities, followed by intellectual degradation, atrophy of the human potential, prevention of regressive trends in the human development all these caused by the technological progress.
The observations show that the active users of technologies, software, mobile apps and social platforms do not know fundamental moments about the origin, stories, creation, evolution, essence, potential of the tools they operate daily with. For example the growing up generation use the camera of the smartphone every day but most of them do not know where and why it is created; what is the full name of the abbreviation "www"; what material is made from the first computer mouse; where comes from the symbol "@"; where comes from the name "Google", what is the story of creating "Facebook" and what were the Marc Zuckerberg's motives to create this social platform. Most of the users of social media and social network sites do not make difference between the both and if they have to speak about the one or the other of them they ray uncertainty and slight discomfort because they realize they do not know leading elements of their own every day.
The course "Social media in education" continues 30 hours tutorials which start with the:
- Essence of socialization and the current metamorphosis caused by the dynamic socialization factors;
- Borders and content of social media as a phenomenon -spreading, evolution, classifications, types, comparative analysis of social media and mass media;
- Typical specifies of Z generation;
- Understanding the concepts "digital immigrants" and the need of recom-posing their thinking in "tradigital" [5, p. 4044] thinking;
- Social effects of social media - economic, educational, history and psychological influence;
- Essence and significance of shaping a digital legacy and forming a digital tolerance;
- Socializing and educational opportunities of social media: Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube.
After orientation in theoretical staging of social media students receive four tasks, two of which for self-work and the other two for teamwork. These tasks allow the learners self-expression and a real possibility for active learning while the course. The developed course aims to follow the ultra-modern social and emotional education and while implementing the
tasks students have to combine the educational traditions using social platforms and technologies parallel.
In two of the thirty tutorials the students overcome the physical frames of the educational organization and have to work virtual in a Facebook group created for the aims of the discipline. The observations show that the learners' interest and activity for a virtual work is higher than for the work in the university's territory. The motives for this shared by the asked students are: the possibility of being any place while solving a task, the extraordinary nature of the virtual meeting for educational purpose and mostly the official presence of Facebook in the educational sphere. The virtual tutorials are new form of organization and realization of the educational process. However a serious education trough Facebook (for now) is corresponding tough with the reality and based on this believes it is acceptable the attractive platform to be a little but official part of the teaching methods, especially for increasing the motivation for social, emotional and educational engagement.
For the first task the students have to work in teams for researching reviewed while the theoretical course topic, to write a text about the researched topic and to visualize it with a suitable PowerPoint presentation. The expected result of this task is: development of cognitive possibilities through receiving some knowledge about the social media, about the process of socialization and about world famous celebrities and people, who could be their model for success nowadays; increasing their personal culture with little-known knowledge of the modern technologies they use; teamwork skills (one of so called soft skills); formation habits of public speaking; digital competences for orientation, selection and visualization of information.
The second task called "Facebook do's & don't's" is for self-work. Watching the news feeds of their own Facebook pages the students have to select 10 human manifestations in Facebook and to show them in a positive and negative way in front of the other students in the tutorial. The task aims to bring out the acceptable models of behavior in the social network so the learners can form an aesthetic sense, which would increase their positive social gravity in the social media space and likability.
The third task is called "Photo hunting" and requires teamwork. The stu-dents receive a list of 22 regulated situations each one of them puts them in a real social context in which they have to take a photo. Every situation gives a certain number of points to the team according of its complexity. The main purpose of the task is to form free communication skills in a real life and overcome the social alienation. The task is also connected with emotional experience because of the curious character of the social situations and creates many new real friendships, real contacts and more live communication in the real life. The observations show that many of the photos students took they post quickly in their Facebook timeline even before showing them for the project in the class.
The fourth task is called "My digital legacy" and is self-work task. The students have to create a digital chronology of its life and to visualize it with a PowerPoint presentation or video using a software or mobile app chosen by themselves. The observations show that most of the learners have poor active vocabulary and while speaking about important moments of their life they have difficulties expressing their own emotions. The task's purposes are stimulating the emotional communication, forming social skills for sharing and listening different life stories and using different software or mobile app which they have to describe if the others do not know it.
Except the mentioned results of every task the results of the whole course of the discipline "Social media in education" could be generalized as:
- classical knowledge for the process of socialization;
- knowledge for the social media and the new technologies;
- operating skills for the continuum of social media's potential;
- mobility skills while learning out of the educational organization;
- digital competences - critical and correct orientation about quality information in the electronic sources;
- digital attitude through learning euphonic cyber word and elimination of vulgarization and hate speech, generated by the opportunity for anonymity and lack of physical barriers.
CONCLUSION
Social media are so popular and used for the development of science and mankind that it is important to look for ideas and practical solutions for the ways they can become a type of educational innovation and have contribution in the education and the upbringing of children, who use them so much. And because teachers are the professionals who dedicate most of their time to the education of children, it is important for them to be familiar with social media and to know their educational opportunities in order to apply them. There is no way that teachers are not already familiar with this part of every day children's lives, because they should be the people who know the most and are the most competent figures for students. There are also unanswered questions: Which social media would facilitate the understanding of school material? Can some of them be used as effective methods of education? Would it be easier to apply the individual approach to each student through social networks, for example? Can sharing professional experience (on an international scale) with colleagues teachers be made easier? Do social media offer opportunities for self-education, creativity, innovation? Would they facilitate the formation of
a stronger motivation for learning in students? Would they be able to help strengthen the communication between teacher and student, between teacher and parent? Would social media be able to show (since they are so popular) models and examples of behaviour? Could they lead to the emergence and development of new teacher roles? Could they be a part of the lifelong learning concept? Moreover, the didactic opportunities of social media, although in a different way and with different specifics, are consistent with the didactic principles: for demonstration, for conscientiousness and activity, for accessibility, for orderliness and coherence, for stable acquisition of knowledge, skills and competencies and for individual approach. To answer all these questions and to find the relation "social media - education", although since a few years only, has interested scientists in the USA and Europe and has been the focus of numerous studies.
References
1. Kietzmann, J., K. Hermkens. Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons54. 2011.
2. Kaplan, A., M. Haenlein. Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1). 2010.
3. Aichner, T., F. Jacob. Measuring the degree of corporate social media use. In International Journal of Market Research 57/2. 2015.
4. Georgieva, V. Pedagogical horizons of social media. In International Scientific and Practical Conference "World Science", Multidisciplinary Scientific Edition №7 (11), Vol.3. UAE. 2016.
5. Georgieva, V. Influence of social media upon socialization of representatives from Z generation. In International Scientific and Practical Conference "World Science", Multidisciplinary Scientific Edition №4 (8), Vol. 4. UAE. 2016.
