Social Networking – Library or Coffee Shop? Part I

The use of social networking tools continues to expand at a torrid pace across all layers of society both nationally and internationally. One of the larger longitudinal studies on adoption of social media in corporations comes out of Dartmouth University and shows an amazing rate of increased social media usage between 2007 and 2008.

Most recently, social networking tools have helped organize Iranian political movements and provided a catalyst to facilitate Barak Obama’s ascendency to the Presidency (read about Chris Hughes).  Who can forget the “twittering” senators who rather unceremoniously tapped on their PDAs in the middle of a senate session? I’ve lost track of the number of times a TV program has used its 30-frame-per-second platform to showcase static blog pages, quotes from Twitter and Facebook pages. From a purely technological standpoint, there’s no denying the fact that social media tools tap into an underlying human need to communicate and build social networks.

What I find intriguing is how best to utilize these tools within instructional or academic contexts. Sure, students and the upcoming generations will always be fluent in the latest social media tools, but how can business and academia leverage their fluency with the latest tools to achieve learning objectives? Some might argue that traditional models of epistemology or instruction have been rendered irrelevant by the highly collaborative, decentralizing nature of Web 2.0. I’ve read a number of articles lately that suggest the latest wave of technology is so robust that there is no longer a real need for instructional technologists, dedicated technology designers or producers.  On Harold Jarche and Jay Cross’ blog, TogetherLearn, I admittedly insinuated not long ago that there should be a more “democratized” distribution of work within educational or training departments. I am quick to agree with those who suggest Web 2.0 be used to empower learners to help create more learning content. My main contention is that the sum of effective instructional principles are not captured by a single theory of learning and in a world that continues to demand more specialization, it’s hard for me to imagine the need for skilled and experienced specialists in any domain has gone away.

On the other hand, for some, Constructivism, “just in time” learner-generated learning or decentralized peer-to-peer collaboration has displaced all other learning approaches. Since we are living in the era of the “citizen” journalist, technologist, photographer, teacher, publisher, writer, etc., the question posed might be: Is there really a need for “professionals” and do we really need training departments or traditional models of teaching people how to do things or change behavior?

Having spent time in both private industry and within academia over the last 15 or so years as an instructional technologist, I think it’s obviously important to embrace the latest technology and look for new ways of changing behavior, but I think that the reality for most enterprise-level training departments or universities is that it’s difficult at best to teach someone how to build a computer, operate on a patient or project manage an IT project without adherence to some type of process that incorporates a systematic approach to learning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]