#SMCEDU Chat: Are Students on Their Own to Learn Media Literacy?

Social Media Club Education Connection (aka #SMCEDU) is a national initiative whose goal is to unite educators, students, and professionals to further the development of social media curriculum in our schools, enabling a wider network of learning and workforce preparedness.

#SMCEDU is a part of Social Media Club, a nonprofit organization that is working to promote media literacy and connect people to share what they are learning about social media.

We’re seeing new participants every week during our #SMCEDU chats, and as we continue to grow (which is so exciting to see), I want to make sure our participants and listeners receive value from each of our conversations. After all, it’s not every day that we have the privilege of joining leading social media educators and concerned/active students in one dialogue, so it’s important to make the most of it.

With that said, I make the (sheepish) acknowledgement that this week’s topic wasn’t completely clear…for that, I’m regretful because it was an issue which I think is crucial to the development of social media as both skill and study. In the future, I’ll post a brief pre-chat blog that will explain the question before we get started.

What caught my attention last week were two posts: a video from Stanford and University of California at Berkeley professor Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) on the new media literacies, the other from USC professor and Provost Emeritus Dr. Lloyd Armstrong (@changehighered) on the societal obligations of higher education.

I was curious if our participants thought that colleges and universities are adequately preparing students for today’s work environment in terms of both technical savvy and critical thinking ability.

Learning Media Literacy & Critical Thinking — Are Students on Their Own?

Howard Rheingold talked about the five media literacies (essential skills in the online community), and Dr. Armstrong brought up the need for colleges and universities to survey their effectiveness in preparing students to compete in a global economy with an emphasis on communication and critical thinking.

These experts say these skills are crucial; do students and educators feel that our schools are doing enough to teach them?

Justin Herman (@justinherman) of Social Media Club New Hampshire felt the answer was a resounding no.

University of Orgeon journalism professor Kelli Matthews (@kmatthews) told us about how her school is adjusting to the new digital landscape. It’s an adjustment that many schools might consider, and Professor Matthews pointed us to her class blog for updates on how it’s going.

Lauren Daniels (@miamilauren) of Miami felt that students are on their own to learn these skills.

M Zayfert of New York (@mzayfert) tweeted about the inexperience among some teachers when it comes to using social media in the classroom, another indication that the need for learning communication in the digital age is not being met.

Kendall Morris (@kendallmorris) of SMCEDU-RVA and Fahrenheit Technology proposed that students are learning these lessons outside of the classroom. She added that while changes are slow, students have a say in their education.

This sentiment was echoed by Social Media Club president and co-founder Kristie Wells (@kristiewells).

Eastern Michigan University professor Tonja Deegan (@tvdeegan) illustrated why one of Mr. Rheingold’s media literacies is crucial to students’ success.

More Takeaways

Tonja Deegan (@tvdeegan) also shared this link to a great post on the cultural shift of social learning. Worth reading!
• Virginia Commonwealth University professor Jeff Nugent (@jeffnugent) lead a workshop on social media in education on Monday in Virginia. His link to the resources from the event is a valuable store of videos, RSS feeds, and other assets. All material is related to social media in education, and I’m sure it will be valuable to many teachers and students.
• There was an interesting question from Deb Rexon of Mt. Laurel, NJ (@dkrex) that asked if there’s a starting point for emergency medical service personnel to become more social media savvy. The question shed light on both a growing interest among emergency workers and a need to meet it. Booz Allen Hamilton social media lead Steve Radick (@sradick) provided a study into social media’s role in crisis communication in response to the question…shared learning in action.

I think our community has been wonderful in not only sharing their thoughts and experiences, but also in welcoming new participants. The spirit of sharing and collaboration is evident, and I hope all can join in again next week!

#SMCQ5 Bloggers: Facts & fallacies

Blogs are full of opinion, insight, fact and fiction… and bloggers can tend to fall in one of a handful of camps:  watchdogs, troublemakers AND authorities! This all, of course, renders the blogosphere such fun and eye-opening reading. However, the SMC Editorial Board wonders, is there an equivalent of ‘journalistic integrity’ in social media? We’d like to hear from YOU.

Our Social Media Question of the Week:
Are bloggers responsible for getting the facts right?

Please tag  your comments, tweets and posts #SMCQ5 and look for the conversation results on Thursday.

Building out the Social Media FAQ

In talking with Chris Brogan recently (during his WordCamp Las Vegas presentation actually) I pointed out the fact that our RSS Streams don’t do much to help build our collective memory. In some ways, a tweet is like a shooting star, if you happen to be looking at the right time in the right place, you can see something brilliant on occasion. They serve as sparks for our imagination, but as with our real world conversations, it’s presence is often more ephenneral then permanent. Chris rightfully pointed out this is why he focuses so much effort on his blog, that there is deeper conversation and permanence in blogging (which is one reason why I am going to try to do more of it in 2009 like this).

In our back and forth, we discussed the fact that the online conversation that occurred in ‘the early days of social computing’ on mailing lists and forums often had significant (and generally misplaced) energy directed at people who joined the community and did not first ‘read the FAQ’ to discover the historically important conversations they had before you showed up. It included some cultural nuances, pointers to reference data as well as answers to questions from people new to the field or the industry or the community of interest or whatever the central topic was for the group.

So in thinking about our mission to further media literacy, our efforts to promote the Social Media profession and the widespread use of Social Media by different people from around the world, we are going to start a new project to build out the Social Media FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). When launched during SxSW (good goal eh?) we hope that people will be able to send anyone interested in Social Media here as their starting point into the world of Social Media. If you have some ideas about what this site should look like or what it should do, please share them in the comments or write them up on your blog and send us a trackback.

In the meantime, please help us get started by submitting one or more of your frequently asked questions below. If you have an answer for the question, even better, but the value of powerful questions is what we are seeking here. Ultimately, the biggest questions will be explored as part of our new International Social Media Club program we are simply calling Question of the Week right now. So let’s get started and move to get all the information, knowledge and insights organized! Not only will it help people learn, it will enable practitioners and professionals to invest more time innovating and less time explaining the basics.

If you get it, share it.

Feature your video or presentation on SocialMediaClub.org

Would you like to have your presentation featured on the home page of Social Media Club? We are looking for the best educational materials on all things related to Social Media (web 2.0, community, new marketing, pr 2.0 and other related materials). Please let us know it exists by adding a link to it in the comments below along with a short description.

When reviewing our media literacy program with Michael Brito the other day, we hit upon another potentially big idea for this important spot on the home page, a weekly course focused on a different strategy or tactic.  By this I mean that one week we could feature a new presentation/video each day on the same topic , such as Blogger Relations.  In this case, we would look for someone (hello members!) to put together an online ‘course’ on these topics that has five lessons in it.

What do you think? How might we do something like this best? Are there any pieces of free or SaaS software out there we could use in conjunction with this program? Please let us know!

PS – we are also starting to develop our webinar program and need help in selecting a vendor.  We will be posting separately on this program, but since it is related, thought I should mention that here as well.