Emerging Technologies Consulting

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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Last week, the Internet was abuzz with the fact that Oprah was going to starting using Twitter.  Techies were pissed that such a mainstream user was invading their space, bringing with her thousands of “soccer moms” who were going to muck it up for everyone.  I was a bit upset with the way the story was getting spun in the technology press and blog sites, mostly that moms were somehow bad for Twitter or too stupid to use it “correctly.”

In some cases, being too popular can be a bad thing.  When MySpace and Facebook became extremely popular and everyone, inculding your weird Uncle Bob, joined up, many found that to be a problem.  I have 243 friends on Facebook, mostly because I just friend anyone who friends me.  And that’s too many for me to manage and so I don’t really use Facebook.  I could cull my friends, but that takes time I don’t have.  Blogs also went mainstream a few years ago, with many bloggers grouping together and forming conglomerates, like The Huffington Post, and every news outlet now has blogs on their site, some of which are quite good, but some . . . well.  And that changed the blog world.  It was harder to get noticed when traffic was going to the big commercial sites.  Some individual bloggers benefitted for sure, getting contracts to blog for big media sites.  But most others, myself included, remained relatively secluded and even less likely to gain a large audience. But, I wasn’t trying to make money off my blog.  I use it much the same way I use Twitter, to express my ideas and share them with a random collection of people who share my interests.  It seems to me that having more people on Twitter might be a good thing.  One could find many more people to Tweet, perhaps allowing you to find a larger market or a larger audience.  No one’s making anyone follow all of Oprah’s followers, and it’s likely that many of those people won’t keep up their Twittering if they don’t find it useful.  And many will also simply follow Oprah and not tweet at all.  Just like with blogs, there are many more readers of tweets than there are writers even if it is slightly less work.  Most people prefer to be watchers rather than participants.

From my perspective as an educator, when a tool goes mainstream, that’s good for me.  It’s easier to talk about tools, both as actual tools that can be used in teaching and learning, and as metaphors–making a classroom more like the blogosphere or the twitterverse–when more people know about them.  Non-technical people start to pay attention when their local news anchors encourage them to follow them on Twitter.  Some things that still haven’t gone mainstream–wikis and social bookmarking–and they are therefore difficult to get people to appreciate their usefulness.  As an early adopter, I understand the feeling of some techies of not feeling like they had the edge on the world by being Twitter users, but I think we need to learn to embrace the mainstream and their use of Web 2.0.  It may, in fact, make Web 2.0 more useful for us.

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I first started using Twitter in early 2007.  When I signed up and collected a grand total of 7 friends, I thought what’s the point of this?  I’m pretty sure I actually said, “I don’t get it.”  Which is what a lot of people say about Twitter and other social media tools.  I finally got it in May 2007, when I atteneded Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington.  There, I collected more friends, friends who were at the conference.  We were able to have a conversation via Twitter about the presentations at the conference.  Sometimes people shared links.  Sometimes they asked questions.  Essentially, we were able to make the conference our own, and, I would argue, get more out of it, by actively participating and engaging with the content, rather than sitting and staring blankly at a panel of presenters.

2 years later, I can’t imagine life without Twitter.  I’m following over 200 people and over 300 people follow me.  Most of the people in my Twitter list are people that I have met in person.  I seem to collect new Facebook and Twitter friends every time I attend a conference.  But I’m glad.  I like having a variety of people in my list who provide a variety of perspectives on issues in my field.  I follow a lot of educational experts, including technologists, professors, and even students.  I also follow social media experts and I have a collection of friends who are in a variety of professions.  The thoughts and links I get from these people are almost always interesting and there have been many times during the day when a small group of us might be reading an article “together” and commenting on it.  It’s a little like water-cooler talk, but also a little more than that.  Besides having these kinds of conversations, I’ve sent out many a question via Twitter that gets answered much faster than if I’d sent out email.  The other day, for example, I wanted to know what other virtual worlds were out there besides Second Life and got 5 or so recommendations within 10 minutes.  Since I work alone at home rather than in an office filled with people, I also like Twitter for making me feel like I am in an office filled with people.  Just like in an office, sometimes I send out Tweets (what the messages sent via Twitter are called) saying that I’m tired or need coffee or a snack or that I’m frustrated with the web site I’m working on.  Or sometimes I talk about the great episode of The Daily Show I saw or how I just finished reading The Watchmen.  It is, as some people have called it, ambient intimacy.  It’s a way of maintaining connections to people you’ve met in a way similar to what you would do in real life.

So, how does Twitter work?  How do you use it?  There are plenty of articles out there that explain how Twitter works and what it can be used for.  David Pogue has a good one on using Twitter for whatever works for you (I think that’s a good philosophy for any technology).   Social Computing Magazine explains some ways for non-profits to use Twitter.  If you’re just getting started, the video below by Common Craft, a company that creates great videos to explain different kinds of technology, is a good beginner’s guide.

I don’t know how long Twitter will last, but I suspect it’ll be around for a while since so many people find it useful.  If you want to follow me via Twitter, I can be found at ETechConsulting or lblanken.

A blog colleague of mine, Jennifer Jones, was scheduled to teach an online course on social media for educators. Due to lack of enrollment, the course was canceled, but she’s teaching it anyway, via her blog.  Her most recent post about social networking includes links to many resources and has tips for how to jump in to using social tools. I highly recommend not just this series of posts, but her whole blog has interesting thoughts about technology use in education and life.