Teachers’ Informal Learning via Social Networking Technology

Abstract

Abstract-Discussion on teacher learning is often limited to a focus on formal professional development programmes. What and how teachers learn informally through their daily experiences is rarely explored. This research attempts to investigate how teachers engage in informal learning for their professional development when using Social Networking Site (SNS) technology. Data were generated using ethnographic approach whereby Facebook Timelines belonged to 22 English language teachers were observed for a period of six months. The analysis shows that the teachers frequently exchanged teaching related knowledge in their Timeline conversations and they received rich responses from both teaching and non-teaching Friends. This paper thus argues that social networking site, such as Facebook is a potential platform to engage teachers in informal learning for their professional development.

Speech Acts in the Facebook Status Updates Posted by an Apostate

“…Social networking site (SNS) is the people's choice platform for communication purposes in this digital era (Boyd & Ellison, 2008;Rashid et al, 2016). Among all, Facebook emerges as a stand out platform for people to communicate and interact with each other around the world.…”

Collaboration, collation, and competition: Crowdsourcing a directory of educational technology tools for teaching and learning

“…It is possible that the positive response to these elements within the crowdsourcing strategy for the current project is related to their growing significance with regard to education in the broader sense. For instance, the use of online platforms for collaboration among teachers with a view to informal learning (Ab Rashid, Yahaya, Rahman, & Yunus, 2016) and the sharing of resources (Ranieri, Manca, & Fini, 2012) has been well established, particularly with regard to Twitter (e.g., McPherson, Budge, & Lemon, 2015), which played an important role in circulating the crowdsourcing call throughout the project and in disseminating the contributions as they were submitted. Likewise, gamification has become a focus of much attention for education in recent times (Dicheva, Dichev, Agre, & Angelova, 2015), particularly with regard to motivation and engagement factors associated with the use of game-based strategies in teaching and learning (van Roy & Zaman, 2018).…”

Supporting English As a Second Language (ESL) Teachers’ Professional Development Through Multi-Platforms’ Online Affinity Space

“…As of April 2019, there are more than 500 posts and more than 23000 active members (Refer Appendix B) in this Facebook Group. [5] notes that the learning through Facebook is considered as an informal one but are part teachers' professional development.…”

“…Despite being led by Master Trainers, Teacherfiera.com is considered as informal learning for the ESL teachers. This is because it existed in the online social network environment [5] and there is no fixed curriculum or programme to be followed [6], but rather the sharing of knowledge and experience are made personally by users while being moderated by the administrators. The different platforms within teacherfiera.com are interrelated and provide different functions that will be explained in the following sections.…”