Creating the future – how should we teach social media?
March 4th, 2009 by Tim Greenhalgh
We met our guest blogger and academic Lorraine Warren at a Twestival event recently and had one of those energizing sessions where people who haven’t met before find common cause and bounce scores of ideas off each other. We couldn’t leave it there and asked Dr Warren if she would write a post for our blog – happily she agreed and brings just a few of her key thoughts on social media to this first of, we hope, many entries. Dr Warren is Director of Postgraduate Education and Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton.
I really love the teaching side of life as an academic in the innovation and new technology field. The real driver for me is that students will go out into the world ready to play a part in shaping new futures, not just reacting to what’s already going on around them. I want them to se
e beyond the management of decline, retreat and recession, and instead look ahead to creating value and change around them, to become thought leaders, and to build new futures and opportunities.
As I’m always saying, disruptive innovation creating new markets is always a possibility, but it’s unlikely you’ll get there on your own. You can’t know everything yourself, you have to bring together ideas from a wide range of sources – that’s what open innovation is about.
To me using, the internet is a big part of looking outside what I’m doing today and thinking ahead to what might happen tomorrow – keeping an eye on thought leaders through the use of social media spaces like Twitter, the blogosphere and Facebook, as well as basic stuff like a library of decent RSS feeds: not to get through the day on current projects, but to check out the periphery, to check out what people who think like I do – and more importantly, what people who don’t think like I do are up to.
To build that up in class, I asked my students recently how many of them used Twitter, wrote blogs themselves, or checked out key bloggers, kept RSS feed libraries, or used something like Facebook to create value in some way beyond parties or the social. Very few hands went in the air, despite all the talk of Generation Y!
Later on, disappointed with this cold start, I asked one of the students, Chris Hughes, why this was. In his opinion, people were just so busy getting on with the needs of the day, and their degree, that they just didn’t see the value right now. Things like MySpace and Facebook came and went out of social fashion, and often weren’t used well, getting clogged up with proliferations of spam and poor quality contacts – and then of course, abandoned.
Ok, not a scientific survey, but still a bit worrying if as educators and influencers we automatically assume that everyone is just getting on with this stuff. I know some new courses are grasping the media and marketing part of this nettle, but that’s not the whole answer for me.
I need to think how to bring this kind of futures thinking more into the assessment process, to focus attention, and get away from using the internet purely as an information resource and basic comms device. Practising what I preach – any ideas out there?
Tags: facebook, Lorraine Warren, myspace, Social media, University of Southampton
March 4th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
great article Lorraine - my final year undergrads have a group project to develop and manage a connected community using a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Ning and YouTube. Still work in progress at the moment but perhaps they might like to add their feedback on what they are learning from this task in the light of your post…?
Lisas last blog post..Online Marketing Presentation
March 5th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Hi Lorraine
I’m a part time MBA student with Soton, but living in Jersey - Lisa Harris held a very interesting two day lecture this weekend just gone, which certainly opened my eyes to Web 2+ - being on the cusp of Gen X/Young boomer, I am just about adept with web 1. I can certainly see the value of social media and it is definitely the way forward - like many things in life, it has to become a way of life, an ingrained habit and I am sure that the time element and having the right equipment will be factors that may prevent Gen Xs + from truly adopting this medium. Also, we know that 90% of people are not proactive, so there is inherent inertia.
Miguel Arraya
March 9th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Yes – In my opinion, Social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace have a negative perceived value relative to the effort of having to nurture and sustain a new account. Obviously, the actual benefit on sites such as Twitter can be quite significant, but students will only know this from an ex-post perspective and so there lies the initial problem. I feel that companies should try to reduce the overheads of the site for people who do not have the necessary time to nurture a new account, for example, Twitter and Facebook, could maybe find ways of making it easier for students to transfer existing contacts from one site to another or at least try to make that application more well known to students, just a thought!