The Impact of Social Media on Education: a Case Study of Mathare Valley's Non-formal Educational Systems

Abstract

Education plays a fundamental role not only in the development of an individual but also to a large extent, the developments of a country. Education is given a lot of attention worldwide with many countries spending a lot of monetary and human resource in ensuring that it stays relevant and continues to serve the role of enhancing development in a country. Due to this indispensible role, Kenya has continued to invest a lot in trying to develop proper structures in the education sector. Since independence Kenya's development mantra has always been heavily geared towards harnessing the potentials of the citizens through the development of education.

Through various commissions of education set up by subsequent governments, various degrees of success in providing relevant education have been made. The latest has been the implementations of Free Primary Education and Universalization of Education. Although this has seen the number of students increasing, there has been a number that still cannot access this education. To ensure that everyone is on board, other measures that are more receptive to the changes that the world is currently experiencing in terms of technology needed to be brought on board. For example, the web 2.0 applications have permeated every corner of the world and are being used to enhance various development fields including the medical field and the business field. It is also making inroads in to education field leading to e-learning

Research has shown that the webs applications have continued to be used in higher levels of learning like the universities to provide online learning and virtual learning. However there is still not much that has been done to bring this new technology into the classroom. This paper will thus try to make a connection between social media applications and education to find out how social media can be used to enhance learning not only to benefit classroom learning but also to aid in ensuring that the out of school students also access education in a more flexible manner if

Kenya is to realize Education For All by 2015.

The study will rely on the use of questionnaires to generate the relevant data that will be used in this study.