Emerging Technologies Consulting

Check out my post outlining tips for using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at Geeky Mom.

I’ve been working on a couple of presentations for the last few days.  The underlying theme of both of them is that people still fear the Internet.  My discussion of this theme with my husband led to some heated arguments.  He thinks that people, especially educators, don’t fear the Internet any more.  He claims they’re willing to use it for research and recognize that their students will too.  That may, in fact, be somewhat true.  I’m still skeptical that it is.  When it comes to social media, however, fear seems to still be the prevailing emotion.  People tout the idea that “stuff you put on the Internet is forever, and you should be very, very careful.”  I don’t disagree, but no one’s giving the other side, that putting good information about yourself online can lead to good things.  And yet, people still seem to think that there’s some kind of bogey man lurking behind the screen who’s going to get you.  If that’s true in higher education, it’s especially true in the K-12 environment.  Dean Shareski writes about participating in a panel on social networking at a local high school that left him feeling very disappointed.  While it’s important to educate students about online privacy and safety (though like Dean, I think very few kids are in any serious danger online), it’s equally important to talk to them about the positive side of social networking and social media.  I’m starting to see kids in college who’ve had this fear message pounded into their heads and in some ways, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.  Employers can’t find anything on them, good or bad, and so they get lost in the crowd.   Being required to use social media, like blogs, in a positive way, as part of their curriculum can benefit students much more than fear mongering can.  Take this comment from a student in my class:

I’ve been surprised at how useful just having some of my writing up on the internet can be. When I was applying for an internship that would involve writing for a blog (many of them do, now, it seems to me), I included a hyperlink for this blog in my cover letter in order to give the interviewer easy access to some writing samples, and it kicked off the conversation in the interview. A friend in this class said this blog came up in her interview, too. So I definitely agree that blogging can help us out in the future–and the future is now, I guess!

The future is now, for sure.  Social networking is not going to go away.  It may morph and change, but making it seem like the destruction of civilization as we know it doesn’t help our kids learn how to use it responsibly.  If they avoid it out of fear, they may miss out on important job and life opportunities.  Is that what we want?

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• Social media threats hyped by science reporting, not science – via @arstechnica (arstechnica.com)

IT World posts two Facebook-related studies, one of which claims that workers who use Facebook and YouTube at work are better employees and the other that says that Facebook users have lower grades.  Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber has already picked apart the second study, suggesting it’s not carefully done, doesn’t account for things like socioeconomic status and that the question is a difficult one to answer anyway.  There may, in fact, be a correlation between students who use Facebook a lot and lower grades, but it doesn’t mean that Facebook is the cause of lower grades.  The second Facebook story, the one that’s more negative has gotten a lot of legs on the Internet, with many blog posts about it and its implications.  The first one, if my reader is any indication, did not gain as much traction.  That in itself, is quite interesting.  I think people are looking for hard data to back up their gut feeling that being online is bad for you in some way.  Any data that shows the opposite just isn’t as appealing.  I think we all know that too much of anything is usually a bad thing.  Whatever that thing is doesn’t much matter, but the media keep harping on the Internet as an evil presence in our lives–which might explain why the media is losing ground to the Internet.

Birmingham City University in the UK is offering a one-year course to study Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  Some are naturally skeptical about the need for such a course, especially for one that confers a degree.  One of my friends and colleagues, Alan Levine, has been known to complain about the desire of many people to have step-by-step instructions for using various kinds of social media.  He suggests that people instead just jump in and start using the things, poke around, spend some time getting to know the tools and how they’ll work for you and how you want to use them.  I agree with him to a large extent.  I don’t think you can go through a list of instructions for using Twitter and have figured out exactly the best way to use Twitter after going through the steps.  You’ll have a Twitter account.  You might even have a follower or two, but you won’t know until you spend some time–maybe weeks or months even–exactly how Twitter will be useful to you.

To me, there are two ways of looking at social media.  There are the practical needs of learning to use the various tools out there and figuring out which ones are viable or work better than others and then there are the effects that those tools are having on a variety of industries and society in general.  The course in the UK looks like it will address primarily that first aspect.  And that’s useful for a lot of people.  Whenever I run workshops on social media, I spend a good chunk of time in hands-on instruction of using different software–Flickr, Twitter, Wikis, Blogs, etc.  It’s always good to roll your sleeves up and spend some time actually working with the material rather than just watching or listening to someone else describe how things work.   The other aspect of social media, the changes it’s effecting on our society, is the subject of many a dissertation in a variety of fields, from sociology and anthropology to computer science and rhetoric and composition.  I also always try to spend some time on this aspect as well, especially as it pertains to higher education.  Although I discourage simply using blogs or wikis or multimedia simply to “get with the 21st century,” I also talk about how many students are interested in actively participating in their education through the use of social media.  But I also talk about how social media for our students is a social and recreational part of their lives and they are often reluctant to use these things for “work.”  I approach the use of social media for learning as an untapped resource.  There are many students out there blogging, making podcasts, and posting videos to YouTube on their own.  Why not take advantage of that creativity in the classroom.  It’s also important to recognize the changes that the web and social media have had on the way students do research and the way they might write their papers.

So, do you need a course to learn all this? Maybe.  If you’re completely new to any social media related and not that comfortable experimenting on your own or just don’t know where to start, a good 1-hour introduction might be a good thing for you.  But it needs to be followed with actually using some of the tools.  If you really think that a blog will be useful for teaching, then I’d suggest setting up one and writing in it on a regular basis to see what it will be like for your students.  Don’t expect to set one up the day before class begins and just figure everything out.  Your students will want help and guidance and most of that will come from you, so you’ll need to be somewhat comfortable with the medium.  On the other hand, if you’re hanging out on the web fairly regularly anyway, then I think a course will only be useful to you if it explores some of the finer or more advanced points of using social media.  It would certainly be useful to talk to others who’ve used social media in their classes to find out what worked and what didn’t, what kinds of assignments worked and how they assessed those assignments.  There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.  But you should also keep in mind that not every tool is going to be worth using in your teaching.  Some tools, like Facebook or Twitter, may just be useful to you personally, though it’s certainly worth understanding those tools if your students might be Twittering your lecture.