The Digitally Connected Worker

The Indian International University 2017: A Retrospective

How social media is being used in education

The striking thing about this infographic is not just the stunning penetration of Twitter, but also LinkedIn. It is also interesting that the bastion of tradition in the US higher education sector, Harvard University, has the greatest reach in terms of its social networks. Among the challenges noted, is that it is not enough to simply have a presence within the social media. To maintain credibility — in terms of marketing and communication, at least — an institution’s social media profile requires full-time attention.

Social media is not about technology

The latest version of the Social Media Revolution by Socialnomics was uploaded to YouTube last week. Some of the statistics have been updated and there are a number of new slides. For me, the most compelling is the very first which simply reads: social media is not about technology. This is so true. I have been campaigning long and hard for several years now to drop the ‘e’ from e-learning. It’s just learning! It’s how we do things now … or at least it’s how our students do things. Social media to a digital native is as normal as pen and paper to a digital immigrant, and yet there is still resistance to the mainstreaming of social media for formal education purposes. The argument that students don’t have sufficient access to technology is starting wear a little thin. In the Sustainable Development and Competitive Advantage MBA class I delivered at Christ University in Bangalore, India, earlier this month, the students twittered about #SDCA so much, it was trending in Bangalore at one stage during the week. On the last day, without any notice, the students made videos documenting their learning outcomes, because 56 of the 57 people in the class either had video capability on their hand held device or on their laptop.

Twitter University

Image source: xaraleeportfolio.wordpress.com

A lot has been written in the last year or so about how twitter might be used in the classroom, and it has even been suggested that it could conceivably replace a course management system. Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has taken this thinking one step further and set up a site called 140 University, “to build and extend your general education”, but “short courses delivered via Twitter and Facebook” are slated for delivery in the near future. Is it possible that formally certified, accredited academic courses could be delivered in 140-character tweets any time soon? Now that would be disruptive innovation taken to the nth degree!