Learning in Students' Favorite Virtual Environment

Unlike traditional educational advocators who believe that knowledge can be directly transferred from teachers and acquired by learners, we believe that knowledge is progressively acquired through students' real experiences. Learning through experiences becomes most effective when the learners are carrying out their learning processes in the environment they feel most comfortable. Our Net Generation students like to spend time in the Internet for their social activities, and many of them spend significant amount of their time forsuch interactions in their favorite environment. This study aims at developing a framework to explore the possibility of conducting learning activities in the environments where our students value the most. We pick the social networking sites which our students frequently visit as our study target. The combination of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies is adopted to understand how social networking sites contribute to effective learning. We suggest that implementing learning activities in social networking sites will increase the likelihood of effective progressive learning. Our proposed framework will thereforebe able to help educators evaluate the suitability of a social networking site for learning purposes in terms of its formality and the learners' habitual uses of it.