Has Social Media Changed YOU?

Terry in his writing “A Citizen Journalism Primer” suggested that in countries that are not democratic, or recently become democratic and where there is a history of indirect or direct state control over official media sources, there is an indication that the Internet has a great significance as an alternative source of news and information.

After the period of New Order (1998), there has been a significant rise of Internet use in Indonesia. On the top of that, there has been an explosion of independent journalism. McNair in his book “Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World” pointed out that Indonesia is moving from the age of information scarcity to the age of information abundance.

Blog has become a tool for instantly publishing thoughts and opinions, sharing information, and conducting Internet businesses. Blog has also become an important source of news along side traditional mainstream media.

Besides blog, there has also been a remarkable expansion on the use of online social networking websites, Friendster was the first social networking website that has gained popularity among Indonesians. According to Hit Search on 10th April 2008, 20% of 20 million Internet Users in Indonesia visited Friendster and 40% of them had Friendster accounts.

After Friendster, the Indonesians are moving swiftly to Facebook. Facebook considers Indonesia as the fastest growing country in Southeast Asia with 645% growth rate in 2008, outpacing the growths in China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

The question here is whether Indonesia is ready and steady with fast pacing of the new media development.

Learning from the recent shocking news, I learn that social media has grown into a powerful and serious tool with a tremendous potential to influence and change one’s destiny – both in positive and negative ways - in a modest country like Indonesia.

The Rising of Home-based e-Learning

Going to school everyday has widely become a norm for getting an education, especially a basic education. Although homeschooling has become more and more popular, the mindset of most people about schooling is still about physical existence and learning activities inside the school building. Especially in Asia, it is often unacceptable if the children only stay and study from home.

I recently read an interesting article about the plan of many schools in Singapore to organize e-learning activities should the Influenza A (H1N1) outbreak worsens.

This is a superb initiative considering the possibilities of having your kids infected to the H1N1 virus from their friends or teachers during their time at theschool. With this scheme, no children will be left behind in their learning activities whether they are sick or well.

My concern is the readiness of the children, teachers, parents and school system to handle with this matter. Although several schools have already employed ICT in their learning activities and the general ICT literacy level has been increasing these days, there are still a lot of stakeholders involved, who might not have got their hands comfortable yet with e-Learning system and ideas.

I presume those schools will take into consideration the system that they are going to use, the methods of delivering the lessons, the activities to engage students in learning, the ICT literacy of the students, teachers and especially parents, who will be sitting next to their children and helping them in their learning process day-to-day.