Emerging Technologies Consulting

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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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.

Via Chris Dawson, I read this Guardian article about the revamping of British primary education to include 21st century communication skills, such as using Twitter and Wikipedia.  Chris’s post includes a quite funny cartoon about the revamped curriculum.  It’s well worth stopping by just for that, as well as Chris’s analysis of the proposed curriculum changes.

I’m all for teaching “21st century skills,” whatever those are.  But I shy away from teaching specific tools.  I think the thing to do is to figure out what the underlying concepts and skills are and teach those with whatever tool makes sense.  Ten years from now, we might not be teaching about using Twitter, but we probably will be teaching about how to find and evaluate information via the Internet in a variety of ways.  One might use Twitter and Wikis and IM to teach collaboration and communication skills.  How do you communicate with your colleague about a project when they’re far away?  Or we might think about fun ways to teach content using these tools.  One criticism of the curriculum is that it’s sacrificing the teaching of certain historical periods.  How could you use blogs, wikis, and podcasts to teach that content instead of teaching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in and of themselves?  For one thing, it’s easier to learn these tools when there’s a specific application for using them and for another, the content might stick better if students are creating their own materials based on the content.  As Chris says, it’s quite possible that this is exactly the way schools will implement these tools, within a good context, but it’s hard to tell from the article.  And that leaves the curriculum open to criticism from folks who feel like things are getting constantly dumbed down.  I’d argue that it’s actually more challenging intellectually to create a podcast about a WWII battle (imagine having to created a fake newscast from the front) than it is to just read about it and listen to a lecture on the facts.  This doesn’t have to be a dumbing down if it’s done well–and therein lies the real challenge.

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.