Harold Jarche is one of the most popular bloggers dealing with social networking, and for good reason – he is insightful. His blog post from yesterday gathers ideas which prompt me to wonder why I haven’t already made twitter a requirement in my courses, and how I can overcome the obstacles to using it in teaching.
In his post he gathers some projections which might not be accurate, but are good enough to work with. he quotes Ross Dawson discussion a Gartner report which projects that in
“….the next three to five years out:
20% of businesses using social media instead of e-mail by 2014
50% of businesses using activity streams, such as micro-blogging, by 2012
20% of businesses will use social network analysis by 2015
70-95% of IT dominated driven social media initiatives will fail through to 2012.”
Now he goes on to make some interesting points about this, but my tangent here is that I am supposed to be preparing my students to operate in this sort of environment, and not to be hopelessly lost in it. In fact, right now I’m doing a bit of SoTL research on on how my second years use discussion forums on Blackboard to faciliate group work. If the Gartner report is even vaguely close to right; I should be well past discussion forums and making them use Twitter, Facebook and other tools for this, all tied up by using hashtags based on the course code (#Hi2007).
One problem is that many of my students are having a hard enough time dealing with the concept of group projects in a humanities subject, never mind dealing with using the discussion forums for organising virtual teamwork. I’ve been setting this assignment for a number of years, and in the end it always works out well, but sometimes it’s a rough road – and this years cohort seem to be making particularly heavy weather of it.
If my students have problems using the simplest of social networking tools in a relatively safe, enclosed space like Blackboard; how would they fare if they have to range across multiple social networking tools? A key problem is that not only will the real world require them to do this in work, but if they are to build effective personal knowledge management newtorks, which they need right now, then they need to be able to range across many different web tools, and be able to migrate their data to newer, better tools as they become available. Indeed, people in my MA class in Digital History, to whom I do teach the theory and practice of social networking, have said that someone needs to teach this to first year undergrads.
There are several problems. One is with the tools, and the lack of proper interaction between different identification schemes. Quite simply, once a student has a longin on our LMS, even something as anonymous as a student id number, they need to be able to use that to create accounts on major services like Twitter and Facebook and whatever else comes along. My students need not to have to create 7 or 8 different accounts on different services, and try to remember different userids and passwords for them all. (They may chose to, or may already have their own accounts on those services – that’s a separate issue.) Now there are some linkages, and several protocols for sharing id and feeds between different services, but none have penetrated the closed world of the corporate learning management system yet; and given the ethos of tool like Blackboard, it is unlikely that they ever will.
The other is that students have a strong perception of different online spaces. Blackboard is where they, often reluctantly, work and Facebook is where they post drunken pictures from “Raise And Give” week while they tweet about the movies they are watching – and heaven forbid a #Hi2007 post would ever turn up in their Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed!
People need to get over this – I don’t agree with never being able to turn off work and having to answer emails from your boss instantly on your blackberry, but I do recognise two things which the new web does support. One is that different people work best at different times of the day or week – I do my best work on Saturday morning because it is my absolute quiet time. Past about 3 pm most days, all I do is slap away the odd email; but that is about the time many of my students are only starting to get going. The second is that I deal more better with students when I know them as people. I can never be friends with all 240 students in second year, but it helps me to work with them if I have a feel for the pace of their lives. In many cases, their inability to work well is a result of their inability to manage time, and I can’t help them with that problem unless I have some feeling for the problem. If people are going to learn about personal knowledge management, then the ‘personal’ part needs to be recognised, social networking is about ‘social’ as well as networking and if people are to have work-life balance, them we need to be away that ‘life’ is half of that balance. One of the well known failures of having the ‘web’ 24/7 is not being able to balance must do work with fun to do stuff, and we’ll never solve that until we learn to look at all of it. Solving it is an essential part of how humanities education should be transforming college students.
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