Introduction
It is no secret that in the contemporary world, social media plays an enormous role in shaping our society. Whether this strong influence is beneficial or detrimental is a debate that enshrines contradicting opinions. However, what is generally understood is that in the context of “learning”; social media is quite advantageous.
It is a known fact that humans are ‘social creatures’. We have this need to socially engage with other people and we do this on a daily basis. We observe, imitate and model others. This has become even more true in today’s world where social media is an obvious part of every socially active person’s life. Hence, it is also true that every single day, we learn something new.
Social Media
Social media profoundly influences various aspects of our lives, shaping how we communicate, interact, and perceive the world around us.
It facilitates rapid information dissemination, allowing users to stay updated on news and trends while also posing risks of spreading misinformation. Social media fosters connections among friends and communities, but it can create echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs. The platforms significantly impact identity formation, as users curate their online personas and are influenced by peers and public figures.
Additionally, social media affects mental health, offering both support and potential feelings of inadequacy due to comparison. In the realms of consumer behaviour and activism, it serves as a powerful tool for marketing and mobilization, while also contributing to political polarization.
Overall, social media acts as a double-edged sword, offering benefits and challenges that require thoughtful navigation. However, what is also true about social media is that it provides an endless platform for people to learn from.
This brings us to the “Social Learning Theory”.
Social Learning Theory
Before delving further into this topic, it is important to briefly understand what ‘Social Learning Theory’ is first. Social Learning Theory highlights the importance of social context in learning, suggesting that our environment and the behaviors of those around us significantly shape our own actions and beliefs.
First proposed by Albert Bandura, this theory emphasizes that learning occurs through observation and by imitating others. This theory suggests the concept that learning does not occur in a vacuum. This means that in order to learn, individuals must engage in interaction. According to this theory, humans observe other people that serve as their models. As they look up to these models, individuals pay attention to what these models are doing and information is transmitter from the models to the learners. The learners then retain that information and store it in their memory. The learner then reproduces that behavior that they had observed and have to remain motivated to do so.
These are the stages of Social Learning that will be assessed in the context of social media below.
Social Learning Theory and Social Media
Social learning theory and social media are intertwined in a way that connections between the two concepts have become a focus of study for years now. Since this is a topic concerning the whole world, it has become necessary to understand how social media can positively impact learning of an individual in various settings, for example, student achievement in a classroom.
Over the past decade, the world has witnessed a tremendous increase in the presence of social media technologies. Modern social structures have undergone significant redefining and platforms supporting those structures have witnessed considerable expansion.
In an Educational context, social media challenges traditional assumptions that have long characterized the learning experience of all students. Gone are the days of one-way communication, for in the age of social media, communication is a two-way, even a hundred-way, process that is interactive and immerses everyone in its hold. In this interactive social media world, the application of social learning theory presents an opportunity to promote leaps in student achievement, as cognitive concepts of attention, memory, and motivation are encouraged by social media. These traits of social learning theory have been explained below, in the light of social media;
Attention and Social Media
Among the factors influencing a student's internalization of a perceived learning feature or knowledge strand; sensory capacity, arousal level, perceptual set, and prior reinforcement have the greatest effects on attention. A social learning exercise needs to address one or more of a student's innate perceptive traits in order to be effective. For example, in a traditional classroom, teachers typically follow protocols when recording attendance. A certain level of attention is fostered when a student's name is stated when engagement is expected, if their perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, is adjusted to the point where hearing their name brings them to attention.
Considering this scenario, picture the student being called by hundreds of voices in a communal digital area. This is how social media excels in keeping the student's engagement with the world of knowledge focused, bringing them back into the context of social learning with each like and tweet. Social media offers a collection of tools that combine interaction and attention. Students that use social media actively participate when they read an article, retweet, like, or write a comment. This is because using social media demands a certain amount of focused attention. Because of the very nature of online social interaction, engaging with the information necessitates maintaining attention.
Hence, Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer a place for extended focus, enabling a participative model that makes it easier for knowledge to be shared. This continuous reminder to pay attention enhances learning procedures and helps the learner stay focused for the entire learning session.
Memory and Social Media
The behaviourist and cognitive approaches to learning theory are connected by social learning theory. It's not enough to focus only on the social environment of learning in an information-rich world. For learning to be truly effective, students must be exposed to outside stimuli and have bits of information stored in their memory that they can retrieve and apply to real-world scenarios. Social contact is a multifaceted system of cooperative components, each of which serves a distinct purpose and may or may not influence long-term memory. Social media improves student prospects for memory production and retention by offering reinforcing stimuli in the form of graphical representations, annotations via peer comments, and the capacity to interact with material in a live situation.
Symbolization, as used in the social learning theory, describes an individual's capacity to form memories and mental representations from fleeting sensory encounters. Because social media contact engages a range of learning styles, these fleeting sensory sensations are amplified in the social media setting. Through the usage of images, videos, charts, and graphs, social media provides visual and auditory stimuli. It also provides tactile sensations through the actual act of engaging with electronic input devices.
The multimodal method of information exchange used in social learning contexts makes interactions more conducive to symbolization and memory development.
Motivation (Self-Efficacy) and Social Media:
In Bandura's social learning theory, self-efficacy is essential. Realizing one's potential influence on the world is largely dependent on one's views about it. When it comes to social learning, students who have confidence in their ability to accomplish a social goal are more likely to put all of their effort into making it happen.
Now consider this in terms of student achievement and classroom engagement. Learning is more likely to happen when sociocultural conditions dictate that depleting resources will lead to a desirable conclusion, if learning is essentially a social undertaking. In an interactive setting, students must share knowledge in order for social learning to take place. However, in a traditional classroom, pupils are still cut off from teachers, parents, specialists, and other members of the community. Since social learning necessitates interaction, self-efficacy is inhibited by this kind of constraint. Students are forced to weigh the pros and cons of participating in class without a platform for conversation. Traditional classroom experiences create hurdles against the social learning context since classroom engagement is a determinant in overall accomplishment and learning. In situations where there is little to no interaction between important role groups both within and outside of the classroom, it becomes challenging for pupils to mimic what they are learning.
Social media offers a low-risk platform for connection with a range of role groups, in contrast to traditional classroom interaction. Social learning theory-recommended interactions are promoted in the social media setting, and because digital interactions are removed from many social fears, users frequently exhibit better levels of self-efficacy with regard to the experience. This increased sense of self-efficacy could lead to more engagement and a rise in student learning.
Implications
Social media use offers educators of all stripes a special chance to introduce their students to a fresh perspective on social learning and human interaction.
Social media applications have been utilized in the classroom to encourage critical thinking and reflection, a sense of community among learners, improved student participation and engagement, and understanding of issues linked to race and diversity. Teachers can no longer hold out doubts about the use of social media and how social learning theory might improve its applications for teaching and learning. The benefits of social media for student education at all levels are widely discussed in the literature.
Conclusion
We can all relate to following ‘trends’ on social media. We have also witnessed how rapidly such trends spread around the world like fire. How everyone seems to jump on a train, copying and imitating the ones before them. This is the greatest example of Social Learning Theory in the age of social media.
Consequently, considering these “influencers” on social media as role models, a lot of the vulnerable part of our population has become susceptible to getting influenced easily. They have started to blindly follow whatever these influencers promote on social media, whether it be something as minor as an outfit to something as severe as surgery. Hence, although in terms of our cognitive processes, social media has no doubt enhanced our attention, memory and motivation, etc, however, it has to be admitted that social media can also serve as a platform that negatively impacts our young, impressionable population.
With that said, if educators can harness the potential of social media, social learning factors may improve, and consequently, educators may positively impact student achievement through the use of modern Educational Technologies.
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