Vienna | If you are thinking about learning, you probably don’t think of it as being easy and fun. Many equate learning with an arduous and tedious journey. Until a few years ago, the 17-year-old Viennese student Benjamin Tim Hadrigan had a similar experience. Once he was even medically certified ADHS and a reading and spelling weakness. Not to mention bad grades at school. Until he finally started to use social media for learning and had success. He wants to pass on his way in optimizing the learning process to others and recently published the book “#Lernsieg: Erfolgreich lernen mit Snapchat, Instagram und WhatsApp” in March 2019, which is over 200 pages long.
In this book he reckons mercilessly with the current outdated school system. The attempts to digitize the school system would have been based on a wrong approach. Because billions of euros invested in computers and other superfluous hardware are ultimately burnt money. After all, pupils have been digitalized for a long time. Pupils’ smartphones are technically capable of doing more than school computers. Therefore, according to Hadrigan, the future of learning lies in mobile learning. Depending on the type of learner – e.g. more visual or auditory – Instagram or WhatsApp are best suited for learning. The photo and video platform Instagram, for example, can be used to collect and receive learning material in a separate private account that cannot be viewed by other users. Explanatory videos, visualizing picture series and mental reflections can be easily captured for the continuous acquisition of knowledge. The social media service Snapchat, on the other hand, can be used to quickly consolidate what has been learned by playing a question-and-answer game with friends. And WhatsApp groups are well suited to helping each other learn, Hadrigan continues.
Hadrigan shows in his book that learning via social media is easy. That can take on collaborative forms, but it doesn’t have to. Proven learning principles such as the need to strengthen one’s own motivation and teamwork have been retained, but are taking on new forms, says Hadrigan. But what the author also shows is that digital natives explicitly demand modern forms of learning in order to be able to learn efficiently. This will presumably have a greater impact on the world of work in the coming years. Benjamin Tim Hadrigan has already arrived there. A year ago, he founded the fashion company “Betterman Fashion” – of course under the legal wings of his already grown-up brother Tobias.
Image: © adiruch na chiangmai – stock.adobe.com
