I’m a huge believer in social learning. Social media, not so much.

To lay my cards on the table: I was using the Internet to communicate before Tim Berners-Lee ever came up with the World Wide Web. Back in those days we used “newsgroups” to have our asynchronous group conversations. I learned a huge amount from newsgroup participants.

From Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Tumblr … almost nothing.

The technical term for people like me is “curmudgeon”. We think the old days were better and the old ways were superior.

I don’t think that about everything, but I miss the heyday of newsgroups and find Facebook and its kin irritation.

All that personal stuff is irrelevant. Objectively, when creating a learning environment in the 201x’s, we must have a social media component, simply because so much of communication between people these days uses those media. So what is their role here in IULHD?

Mostly communication: announcements, communicating with non-students, scheduling non-company events (e.g. an Open House), and so forth. In a corporate environment, services like Facebook and Twitter are just too open. Information about our internal processes and procedures and such are confidential and must not be on those services.

Broadening the definition: social media (as opposed to social media services) like blogs and scheduled web shows and Yammer can be incredibly useful for a community like this. Web shows would tie in the video we covered in our last unit (along with the podcast, a medium I personally like a lot), while blogging allows for easy, fast publication and easy, painless subscriptions to information feeds. That’s where I plan to put  most of my emphasis. (In fact, in the real world we roll out a weekly web show some time early in 2015.)

How about social learning? The thing is, most current social media don’t allow what I think of as social learning: collaboration between students. In that context, I’ve found that Google Apps is a fantastic tool for certain types of learning and collaboration. The fact that two or more people can edit the same document, and see each others’ work updated on their screens in real time, is astonishingly useful. Combine with Google’s explicitly-social media (included) like Plus and Hangouts (formerly Google Talk), and you have a really excellent package. This may be the future of social media/social learning.