…about the Web-shaking announcement that will be made by the latest Internet darling today. And it’s this sort of “didn’t we go through this ten years ago?” hype that may be holding back at least some of the potential converts to social media in the association world (and, no doubt, elsewhere). “Frivolous” is the term one participant at the recent ASAE online e-learning conference applied to perceptions of social media. I am pretty certain the F-word and its cohorts (with a dash of Second Life hype thrown in for good measure) are the source of that perception.
Still, all hype aside, there are great potential benefits to be realized from adoption of social networking and other forms of social media by associations and other member-oriented organizations. Lisa Junker and the other folks over at ASAE’s Acronym blog certainly recognize this fact and have thus dubbed November Social Media Month. Be sure to stop by, peruse the postings, and leave your two cents (and kudos to Lisa et al for the initiative).
With Acronym’s effort in mind, and having just participated in ASAE’s online e-learning conference, I thought I’d point out a few items—many Facebook-related—that might be of interest to Social Media Month participants as well as anyone else interested in social media, online learning, and Learning 2.0.
- New Media Literacy Part I and Part II over at Robin Good’s site is a series based off of a recent Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
) presentation. As Robin Good puts it:
New Media is the notion that learning how to use new media technologies, online collaboration tools, personal publishing and live video streaming gear is not just about being cool and hip but it is a set of fundamental skills every young person should be equipped with to be able to navigate the digital realities increasingly surrounding us.
- Joshua Porter over at Bokardo points out and comments on a presentation about community design by Christina Wodtke. In it Wodtke suggests, among other things, that Facebook “is a lot like the next Google” (Porter’s words). Google watchers, of course, have also been a-Twitter lately about the new Open Social platform. (Gasp! Will Facebook sign on?!)
- Tony Karrer recently did a couple of postings on Facebook’s potential as a learning platform entitled, appropriately enough, Facebook as Learning Platform and Facebook Platform. While there is any number of postings of this nature out there right now, Karrer’s blog strikes me as one of the better places to start in exploring the topic. Notably, Karrer mentions that Facebook could have been chosen as the platform for the upcoming free corporate e-learning conference. But it wasn’t
- Continuing along the Facebook path, Stephen Downes points to a posting about the inevitable: Second Life profiles in Facebook. For those of you who weren’t already finding the social networking frenzy a bit overwhelming, this should seal the deal.
- Finally, in your continuing quest to make sense of it all, I recommend dropping by Karl Kapp’s blog and picking up the materials from his recent Wikis, Blogs, and Social Networks presentation (where LinkedIn, Naymz, and Flockpod are mentioned, but Facebook is not). Karl does a good job with PowerPoint, which is why I referenced his presentation on effective us of PowerPoint a while back.
Note that some of the links above are already part of or will be added to the set of social media URLs I am maintaining on Del.icio.us. Have fun exploring.