Social Network Intervention in Environmental Education

Abstract

In the recent past Environmental Education (EE) has been introduced as one of the core course in the curriculum of higher education in India. The objective was to make every student aware of the biodiversity and infuse a pro-environmental attitude in them. The efforts to achieve this objective through traditional methods of classroom teaching, predefined syllabus and textbooks has not produced the expected results. We need an approach that will impart values and educate students to conserve and protect various elements of our of biological wealth. With so much of success of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln and YouTube amongst the young generation for information sharing and communication, one is compelled to think whether social networks and social media can be of any help in making courses such as Environmental Education (EE) more attractive and informative. With this guided inquiry we used Facebook’s information dissemination platform with an aim of creating and promoting learning environment for exploring, proposing strategies, resources, and information sources to students collaboratively. The preliminary results and feedback from student community are very encouraging and motivating, depicting deployment of environment friendly attitude in students.