The debate about social media today goes something like this:
- Social Media Fanboy: Your PR departments have missed the cluetrain and generate inauthentic corporate jargon-laden technospeak that doesn’t connect to the needs of individual people!
- Guy Who Still Reads Newspaper: Your social media sounds great, but only a specific demographic uses it, it’s leaky and liability-prone for a big organization, and sometimes editing content is really, really, important – have you seen the comments people leave on YouTube?
And so it goes… This argument is playing itself out in many institutions, corporations, and even small businesses. Part of the issue in corporate and institutional social media adoption is that it has to be mapped onto sales so some sense of ROI can be calculated for those who need proof. It’s an interesting argument to listen to, and even to engage in, because both sides have valid points. Here are the two most valid points I see:
- Pro: Social media is informal and low-risk enough to generate relationships that are customized, genuine, and authentic
- Con: Traditional media models generate a predictable product that due to its cost absolutely has to be answerable to its readers, who will demand a certain level of quality
It will always be true that if you start out as a self-hosted blogger and end up with a job offer to work for TIME magazine, that you’ll have moved up in the world of reputation, prestige, and probably salary (although for some bloggers who make a LOT of money, this wouldn’t be the case). Even the wealthy blogger elite, who mix traffic-generating content with clever product promotion to produce their value for retailers, would probably agree that a big book deal from a major publisher or a 6-figure job offer at a major new company would be a significant achievement. So that sums up the debate, and why it’s interesting, well-balanced, but very often…confusing – because social media is such a context-dependent and niche tool, and traditional mass media has always been, well, for the masses.
So when we bring social media and all its accoutrements together with higher education, accreditation, intellectual property, and neuroscience – how might these tools become the catalysts for fundamental change – and what might yet stay the same? First we have to tackle the question of how do we learn on social media?
The Answer: Better than ever before!
The Reasons:
- Education has always been about third-party content absorption mediated by social relation to a mentor or guide. Back when the only ‘textbook’ was the Bible in Latin, the feeling of personal removal from content must have been considerable. But the monks and seminary teachers mediated interaction, reflection, and yes – rote memorization – with this “third party” content in order to train more monks, preachers, etc… Content that commands social credibility will generally tend to become the subject matter of educators – and this is why education is inescapably a political and controversial topic – because the battle over content is deeply enmeshed with our value systems and ideals.
- Social media does the same thing. Generally, there are sources of information and content, and there are the people that mediate our interaction with that content. The brilliant thing about social networking tools, is that our entire day’s worth of content can be mediated by a group of friends, relatives, or people we trust. Twitter has become my daily directory for cool articles to read and sites to visit – and when someone tweets useless garbage, I unfollow them so I can get just the best stuff each day sent to Echofon or Tweetdeck.
- Mentors must be trusted. Trust is such an important part of the equation that it shouldn’t even be thought of as a standard ‘variable’ to be optimized. Trust is more about what binds you both to your personal beliefs and values, and why those beliefs and values resonate with other people. The more something sounds like truth, or at least meshes with a cultural meme that you happen to subscribe to, the more it will be trusted. Trust can be abused, but I don’t think it can be ‘manufactured’ effectively or morally. It’s not something to optimize – most of the time we just know it when we see it.
That’s really more of the ‘why’ – social media does work as an educational tool, but it isn’t a bullhorn – as much as administrators and professors want to believe that it’s just a channel to push out their message and assignments to students – it’s not. The real learning and education is happening on Twitter because of serendipitous conversations between total strangers. This same incredible learning happened for me time and again in the virtual world of Second Life. Becoming acquainted with someone new, trustworthy, and interesting has never been so easy. You can seek out mentors for yourself in a way never before possible. Most of these ‘mentors’ help others for free, because they want to start relationships or help someone join a particular community – they are not paid teachers or administrators working anywhere that would be even remotely described as an educational institution.
So how do we improve educational outcomes in a world where everyone’s become a teacher and everyone’s become a student – and sheisters run wild promising to help you learn how to become a millionaire by buying their $49.99 ebook? At SelfReliant, we refer to this sort of education product as ‘crap education’ – and despite the great usefulness of Google for scam avoidance, people seem to continually believe that behind the paywall of the ‘crap educator’ is a treasure trove of knowledge that can only be found for a hefty fee. This is what we refer to in economics as ‘information asymmetry’ – and in more common parlance as ‘let the buyer beware’.
Well, for generations we’ve had a quasi-governmental nonprofit system for closing the information asymmetry gap in the world of education – and it’s called accreditation. What we’re seeing now emerge is a new economics of accreditation, wherein the organic and informal learning happening on social media platforms – most of which never occurs with the professorial set, but rather between peers, friends, family, or thought leaders – needs to be codified by a more open, flexible, and innovative accreditation infrastructure.
Here are just a few things I’ve done online in which I feel I learned something:
- Met people in India, Germany, and Australia using Second Life – got to practice my German a bit and have a number of conversations about life in those countries.
- Every form of content imaginable has been forwarded to me by thought leaders on Twitter I follow. Some of them work at universities, but even then, I’m not paying to go to their school and enjoy the benefit of their tweets. Most of my internet browsing now starts and ends with my tweetstream. Are some of these people my mentors? Hellz yeah. Do they even know who I am? For the most part, not really.
- Have you ever needed a detailed video tutorial on almost anything? I have, and I use Youtube and other online video providers to find great educational content. If it looks like they’ll produce more, I’ll ’subscribe’ to their YouTube ‘channel’ for free.
Sure, sure, this is great stuff if you have a thirst for knowledge somehow encoded in your DNA, but in the case of the 99.9% of kids who seem to just want to hang out online and play Flash games, how can I say the Internet is a useful educational tool? Many kids who do try to find relationships online end up relating to BAD people – people who at the very least will scam them or teach them things that are patently false. So the monolithic educational establishment is left shaking its head in disgust. How can we stop these Facebookers, these digital hoodlums with their ubiquitous mobile phones going off during lecture? When will the insanity end?
So the insanity isn’t going to end – as you’ve probably already guessed – as preservers of the established order and status quo, you’re not going to be able to supplant Facebook and Twitter with textbooks and letter grades – adoption rates are too high among young people, and it is academia that will have to adapt this time – not students. This is not just a temporary uphill battle for educators – it will be a multi-decade phase transition – a struggle to redefine the soul of academia by reinventing academic credit, so it maps better onto this wave of organic learning that’s being catalyzed by Internet and mobile technologies. Some call it edupunk, some call it project-driven learning, informal learning, self-driven learning, etc… Just to be different and overly verbose, I call it online microenterprise self-education, a mouthful to be sure.
One final note about educational technology, and then I hope I’ll be able to get some critical feedback to this first of many blog posts here on the new SelfReliant site. Educational technology or edtech is at a crossroads, at least from what I can tell, because there are two different sets of priorities in play when ‘edtech’ gets built and deployed. Those two are, in no particular order:
- Institutional Needs
- Learning Outcomes
Companies like Blackboard that make elaborate and commercial ‘learning management systems’ or LMS’s are primarily responding to the first need – what does the professor need to be able to do in the course of doing their job? How can an online tool assist with their day-to-day tasks? They do not ask the question, “Is the job professors are doing every day ineffective and failing to produce learning outcomes” Institutional needs and priorities trump the measurable learning outcomes piece time and time again.
What’s happened is that social software has allowed some motivated individuals to hyper-charge their own learning and to find cheap, high-quality mentors at high speed – and so for them, Internet apps are these extraordinary platforms for personal growth and learning. Finding better ways to measure these learning outcomes and then assess their rigor and intellectualism in their natural, extra-institutional habitat, is the future of learning. While the Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai LMS’s have all self-selected on the basis of faculty and administrator approval, what we see is that the winners in social media are again and again self-selecting based on raw learning outcomes. What’s happened is that the institutions have decoupled from learning outcomes – only now are they beginning to realize that the value they add is more and more in a role of assessment, review, and credentialing. By completely stopping the waste of time that is the classroom environment, truly forward-looking intellectuals could massively widen their impact on students by becoming objective third-party accreditors of the best and brightest conversations being codified out there in the blogosphere and twitterverse.
So if you got this far, I hope you’ll drop me a note and comment! This blog is going to eventually turn into a book – and if you have something interesting to say on this topic, then you may end up in it (with you advance permission given of course). I’ll try to get your comments approved as quickly as possible so we can get a robust dialogue going. Please also excuse the newness of this Wordpress site – I’ll be modding it all and uploading our logo header shortly.