School's out
Thu, May 20, 2010 Filed in: Social Media
Teaching social media as a professional tool to grad students has been an interesting learning experience. Having a background in television production, web production and living in social media, I was considered a “rare hybrid” in a “unique position to teach.” Ok, well, lets see about that. Going in, my assumption was I wouldn’t be teaching too much. Don’t 20 year olds know all about this stuff? I fully expected to learn more then teach. All the “press” going in was “the kids know all this stuff.” All the jokes about how parents have their 12 year old fix the printer. The 10 year old is “helpdesk.” So, the first day, the first question I ask was “how many people have a Facebook account. A few hands go up. Yikes. “How many have a Twitter account?” Fewer hands. Well, it seems I will be teaching after all.
Building a presence
The concept of using social media as a professional tool was the focus of the class, starting with a Google account and creating content on Blogger. Students were told to pick a topic they would be “an expert” in. Food, fashion...it was their choice. Google Buzz was launched shortly after the semester began and we gave that a try. Buzz is still like my experience with the then-new Twitter when I first opened my account. Nobody to talk to. But we used it as a “crowdsource” experiment and the expected negative results were most enlightening. The concept of crowdsourcing is people gathering based on a like interest. Without that like interest, crowdsourcing fails.
Twitter
We moved to Twitter as a means of gaining reader/followers and by connecting with others in the same field. While most of the students were familiar with Facebook, Twitter was a site they heard about but had very little interest in. Note to business..your 18 to 30 year old demo don’t seem interested in short form text blasts. It was a struggle to keep the class interested in Twitter and to see any value in it. My attempt to show off Twitter (look, I talk to astronauts!!) failed to get their interest in the platform.
Cloud as a teacher aide
Since this was a New Media Technologies class, I wanted to try as many web apps as I could with Google apps. I was expecting better, or at least different. I gave Docs a try for testing with limited results. Some fields were missing for some of the students. Some were missing for all of the students. Also, the format of the returned document wasn’t practical unless I had a screen about 3 feet wide. Gmail’s style of threading is also not a fav. When you are sending an email out to many people, and they reply at different times, it’s difficult to see when a new reply comes in. Most things from Blogger through to Gmail seem “almost there”. Wave, which I expected to use heavily, seems to have died. Buzz has not reached practical users levels and I’m not sure it will soon based on the trend.
International Experience
Several of my students were from China and Korea. Working in Italy a couple of years ago turned me on to working with different cultures. It’s fascinating to see how other people accomplish the same thing in different ways. The sites in China were the most interesting. They have attempted to isolate themselves while using the same technology. One of my students was a regular on a site that looked quite familiar, except for the colors and characters. I failed to note the URL, but imagine this site with red text and Han letters.
Ignore the Buzz
The fun thing about this topic, there is always something new. “Community Pages” on Facebook might be a nice way to add online presence. Finding different ways of using 4 Square and the other geo-aware apps could be another. Like business, I am looking to find new ways to use social media in a professional way. And like business, I am finding that sometimes you need to look past the media buzz about the latest thing, and find out how it’s actually being used. Lesson one....ask the users, ignore the developer.
The concept of using social media as a professional tool was the focus of the class, starting with a Google account and creating content on Blogger. Students were told to pick a topic they would be “an expert” in. Food, fashion...it was their choice. Google Buzz was launched shortly after the semester began and we gave that a try. Buzz is still like my experience with the then-new Twitter when I first opened my account. Nobody to talk to. But we used it as a “crowdsource” experiment and the expected negative results were most enlightening. The concept of crowdsourcing is people gathering based on a like interest. Without that like interest, crowdsourcing fails.
We moved to Twitter as a means of gaining reader/followers and by connecting with others in the same field. While most of the students were familiar with Facebook, Twitter was a site they heard about but had very little interest in. Note to business..your 18 to 30 year old demo don’t seem interested in short form text blasts. It was a struggle to keep the class interested in Twitter and to see any value in it. My attempt to show off Twitter (look, I talk to astronauts!!) failed to get their interest in the platform.
Cloud as a teacher aide
Since this was a New Media Technologies class, I wanted to try as many web apps as I could with Google apps. I was expecting better, or at least different. I gave Docs a try for testing with limited results. Some fields were missing for some of the students. Some were missing for all of the students. Also, the format of the returned document wasn’t practical unless I had a screen about 3 feet wide. Gmail’s style of threading is also not a fav. When you are sending an email out to many people, and they reply at different times, it’s difficult to see when a new reply comes in. Most things from Blogger through to Gmail seem “almost there”. Wave, which I expected to use heavily, seems to have died. Buzz has not reached practical users levels and I’m not sure it will soon based on the trend.
International Experience
Several of my students were from China and Korea. Working in Italy a couple of years ago turned me on to working with different cultures. It’s fascinating to see how other people accomplish the same thing in different ways. The sites in China were the most interesting. They have attempted to isolate themselves while using the same technology. One of my students was a regular on a site that looked quite familiar, except for the colors and characters. I failed to note the URL, but imagine this site with red text and Han letters.
Ignore the Buzz
The fun thing about this topic, there is always something new. “Community Pages” on Facebook might be a nice way to add online presence. Finding different ways of using 4 Square and the other geo-aware apps could be another. Like business, I am looking to find new ways to use social media in a professional way. And like business, I am finding that sometimes you need to look past the media buzz about the latest thing, and find out how it’s actually being used. Lesson one....ask the users, ignore the developer.