From Chris Brogan’s blog, Social Media Tools Are Like Phones
“One thing we misunderstand frequently when talking about how great and amazing social media is comes from the fact that we’re thinking from the perspective of what we want the tool to do while the people who are receiving the message might be thinking about the tools in the abstract. When we talk about how Twitter forges real time conversations and delivers business value, others show up and see us bitching about a late flight and live tweeting the baseball game. When we talk about how blogging changes the world, other people are slogging through all the crap blogs indexed by Google when they’re looking for actual useful information.”
He makes a very interesting point that when a new technological tool emerges, we spend the first part of its life trying to figure out what it is useful for. At a certain point, that process becomes transparent, when the tool just becomes embedded in our daily lives – think of the cell phone or even email, how they didn’t exist a generation ago, then they were a minority interest mainly for professionals and now are ubiquitous and we couldn’t imagine life without them.
his key point is that social media tools are just that, tools for communication that allow for more “nuance”, the revolution as he sees it is in how we use them.
In his case it is to market products to consumers, but in our sphere i think the key is in personalising learning, so each learner feels more like they are getting a bespoke educational experience that is tailored just to them, a unique learning journey where others have laid out some signposts, but by forming alliances and communities of practice with like-minded voyagers, their journey is a far richer experience than it could have been previously.
That’s certainly been my experience with using blogs in my post grad course, they have greatly enhanced the ‘personality’ of the students for me, and opened up their thought processes in amazing ways.
For me, these tools are about communication, collaboration, collective knowledge and connected knowledge.