Putting Social Media Education Into Focus: A Community Proposal

For over three years, Social Media Club has worked to promote media literacy and connect people to share what they are learning about Social Media. Today, we are launching a new project to bring together the education and professional communities to further the development of social media curriculum in our schools. The #SMCEDU project seeks to ensure that graduates from every college/university are media literate and are able to competently understand and apply the emerging lessons from social media in organizations. It has always been the goal of Social Media Club to create what I think of as a “path to professionalism” for citizen journalists, story tellers, video producers, communications professionals and engineers.

We will support existing social media education efforts such as PR Open Mic, Classroom 2.0, Social Media Classroom and others while also seeking to coordinate efforts with school administrators and local professionals. Initially we expect a lot of participation coming from the US and will focus our efforts here (though I hope UBC in Vancouver also gets involved early), but we are most assuredly thinking globally in our long term scope.

Key to our success will be connecting the local Social Media Club groups more closely with their local universities to co-create a combination of mentoring programs, internships, professional development opportunities and a repository of Creative Commons licensed Social Media curriculum. As such, we are seeking local Social Media Club chapters with existing professors and ties to local schools to join our efforts to create some pilot programs. If that is you, please join our working group or at least join the SMCEDU Ning site we created for the project.

We are initially focusing on foundational research on what exists and identifying who is already teaching social media in colleges and universities. You can find a list of Social Media Teachers on our project Wiki which we have built from twitter replies so far (please do add to the list if you are or you know someone teaching social media).

We are now moving quickly to form a working group of interested Social Media teachers and local Social Media Club leaders to refine the parameters of the project. Join us for the kickoff conference call next Tuesday July 28, 2009 at 8am PST (more details under events on Ning). Our second conversation is seemingly to assess the state of Social Media education in universities in order to understand where we can provide the most value together. I think a weekly community podcast lead by the working group is in order…

Social Media Club has always promoted the importance of community, and in so doing has created relationships with other community organizers that are invaluable in manifesting this effort. It is going to be us, together, that will make this a success, not any individual company, group or organization. In fact, the impetus behind the current effort towards improving social media education in schools was inspired in large part by Steve Radick, the Social Media lead at Booz Allen Hamilton. Mr. Radick reached out to us in June about what we might be able to do to improve workforce literacy in social media and the SMCEDU initiative is the outcome. In talking with many people over the years, and even more recently, the time to undertake this effort really is NOW.

We understand this is a pretty big ball we want to get rolling, and the momentum we’re hoping to create will need the contributions of teachers, professionals, students and administrators. Connecting social media teachers to local members of Social Media Club is a top priority and something each of you can start to do today to improve the quality of education our schools are providing around social media and emerging technology.

Ultimately, we would like to formally connect our local chapters to universities, but initially we are merely seeking better informal relationships so we can determine together how to best proceed. Each situation will be a little different, but there will be enough commonality that we will all benefit immeasurably from collective action. We see Social Media Club as being able to facilitate numerous opportunities for students and teachers, but also see great benefits for local SMC leaders to coordinate with students and teachers on hosting social media training and more outside the classroom. In fact, developing a standard introduction to Social Media webinar / teleclass to be offered for free each week is a goal we are setting for October 1.

There are unique challenges in offering courses in areas of emerging practices and technologies. The rate at which technology is changing is overwhelming – what’s useful today will ultimately be overshadowed by a better method tomorrow. We hope to help school’s keep up with that change by offering an open, and ever changing, repository of social media curriculum, available through Creative Commons Non Commercial Share Alike licensing. Educational institutions often time considerable time to update their curriculum, so rather than waiting for a global change in university policies, we think we can help by offering free online webinars to students and teachers alike. If you join us in building this new community around #SMCEDU – one that allows advancement through sharing, contribution, and collective effort, I know we can be successful together.

Why do this? Besides it being core to our purpose, we see the world as having an economy largely based on knowledge, meaning ongoing education is not only a competitive advantage, but also key to our ability to thrive as a global village. We can leverage our knowledge of how the tools work, together with our relationships to teachers and professionals who know even more then we do to make a difference. We can provide students with the tools they need to get better jobs and in so doing provide organizations with a better prepared and media literate workforce.

The younger generation is tech-savvy, to be sure…but how many see the value of Twitter as more than just a way to broadcast what you had for lunch? How many utilize the learning power of iTunesU? Although today’s college students grew up in a web world, the way organization’s use social media is quite distinct from what they know. Social Media for organizational or social advocacy purposes or the development of public media and citizen journalism are all things that need to be experienced to be understood.  Ultimately, SMCEDU will provide opportunities for students to have those experiences and for everyone to be the better for it. The better prepared students are to enter the workforce, the more value they can provide and the more opportunities they will have to make a difference.

We’re excited about this project and hope that you are, too. If you’re interested in participating in this project please join our new SMCEDU Project Community on Ning. If you want to be a part of the working group that will lead the project, please just request to join the SMCEDU Working Group on the Ning site and join our conference call next Tuesday July 28 at 8am PST.

Of course, you will also want to follow the blog posts here on Social Media Club. The principle blogger leading the project is Yong C. Lee (@yongclee) who is interning with us this summer and perhaps a little beyond to help shepherd this project forward. In addition to blogging, he will be organizing the research, handling community relations on Ning and essentially running the project with a little guidance from me.

So if you want to improve the quality of social media education being offered in schools, please join us to improve social media education in our schools today.