Under its National Strategic Plan for Education, for both higher and lower education, Malaysia is positioning itself to have an ICT rich teaching and learning environment. Towards meeting this objective the levels of investments on ICTs has been on the increase for the past two decade at least. This has kept in tandem with the nation's investments in the ICT infrastructure.  The SMART schools programme as well as the provision for PCs, laptops and netbooks to teachers and children have at least made school communities receptive to the idea of using technology tools for teaching and learning. In higher education, publicly funded universities have received massive amounts of funds to strengthen their technology capacities and capabilities.

In a recent presentation at a local conference Prof. Mohamed Amin Embi (2011) presented data that clearly shows that a shift towards a culture of working in a technology supported environment is taking place. However Prof. Embi also noted that this process is not system wide: there as many instances of poor policy and governance regimes as there are of good ones; in practice, about half the institutions had dedicated e-content development units and these normally acted as ‘transformers' of raw content from subject experts to e-learning content; about half of the institutions offered about half their courses on line; generally staff expected rewards and incentives to develop skills which were not freely forthcoming. Prof. Embi's presentation did not describe instances where social media was specifically, making it difficult to describe social media trends in higher education in the country. However two case studies described by Hamid et al. (2011) in a recent conference in Australia shows remarkable similarities in approaches to practices in other jurisdictions. In Activity 3.10 below you are asked to read the paper by Hamid et al. as well as watch a PowerPoint presentation by Prof. Laura Freeburg from California Polytechnic. On completion of reading and viewing compare and contrast the approaches of the two Malaysian cases with that of the North American case.