E-flections » social media

Social Media Tools Are Like Phones

paullowe — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:37:13 +0000

From Chris Brogan’s blog, Social Media Tools Are Like Phones

“One thing we misunderstand frequently when talking about how great and amazing social media is comes from the fact that we’re thinking from the perspective of what we want the tool to do while the people who are receiving the message might be thinking about the tools in the abstract. When we talk about how Twitter forges real time conversations and delivers business value, others show up and see us bitching about a late flight and live tweeting the baseball game. When we talk about how blogging changes the world, other people are slogging through all the crap blogs indexed by Google when they’re looking for actual useful information.”

He makes a very interesting point that when a new technological tool emerges, we spend the first part of its life trying to figure out what it is useful for. At a certain point, that process becomes transparent, when the tool just becomes embedded in our daily lives – think of the cell phone or even email, how they didn’t exist a generation ago, then they were a minority interest mainly for professionals and now are ubiquitous and we couldn’t imagine life without them.

his key point is that social media tools are just that, tools for communication that allow for more “nuance”, the revolution as he sees it is in how we use them.
In his case it is to market products to consumers, but in our sphere i think the key is in personalising learning, so each learner feels more like they are getting a bespoke educational experience that is tailored just to them, a unique learning journey where others have laid out some signposts, but by forming alliances and communities of practice with like-minded voyagers, their journey is a far richer experience than it could have been previously.

That’s certainly been my experience with using blogs in my post grad course, they have greatly enhanced the ‘personality’ of the students for me, and opened up their thought processes in amazing ways.

For me, these tools are about communication, collaboration, collective knowledge and connected knowledge.

danah boyd on social media and teenagers

paullowe — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:18:20 +0000

Danah Boyd, one of the key researchers on the use of social media, is joining the microsoft research

team to work on social networking

here is a link to a fascinating talk she has just given there about how teenagers use social media .

(scroll down to find her talk)

Here is the abstract for her talk

Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era
danah boyd, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Web2.0 signals an iteration in Internet culture, shaped by changes in technology, entrepreneurism, and social practices. Beneath the buzzwords that flutter around Web2.0, people are experiencing a radical reworking of social media. Networked public spaces that once catered to communities of interest are now being leveraged by people of all ages to connect with people they already know. Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook enable people to map out their social networks in order to create public spaces for interaction. People can use social media to vocalize their thoughts, although having a blog or video feed doesn’t guarantee having an audience. Tagging platforms allow people to find, organize and share content in entirely new ways. Mass collaborative projects like Wikipedia allow people to collectively create valuable cultural artifacts. These are but a few examples of Web2.0.

Getting to the core of technologically-mediated phenomena requires understanding the interplay between everyday practices, social structures, culture, and technology. In this talk, I will map out some of what’s currently taking place, offer a framework for understanding these phenomena, and discuss strategies for researching emergent practices.

workliteracy

paullowe — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:50:15 +0000

I’ve just joined a free online workhop on work literacy looking at using social media run by 3 of the bestedubloggers around, michele martin, harold jarche,and tony karrer .Its run as a ning site, which I’m keen to see how it works as i have been toying with using ning to set up a social site for the course I teach at LCC.

you can sign up at workliteracy here