Social Media is in the limelight again in the wake of the happenings on in Egypt. I myself have been so busy recently that I have not been able to do my usual level of tweeting and facebooking. We had to open up discussion on the Email/Calendaring to the Wellesley Community and I had to share with the Library and Technology Policy Committee several policy documents. As you know, policy documents take up a lot of time. Policy documents are important, but in my opinion, they need to be relevant, short, readable, to the point and practical. On the EDUCAUSE CIO list I was surprised to find that a few institutions have policies on policy documents. Hmmm… I wonder who wrote that one.

Social Media as we know is a web based technology platform for easy social interaction. Ease of use and access are critical for this to work correctly. As we know, some of the technologies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have fared very well in this space, but a lot of them such as Google Buzz, and Ning have failed to catch on. The most recent rumor is about Yahoo! planning to shut down del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. The struggle for us, the technologists, is what advice to give to those we support regarding the use of these.

Already our users complain of tech creep – too many technologies, many are user-unfriendly, too many changes, shorter life spans (I am talking about the life span of technologies, of course), and too little time to learn them. All are very valid. On top of all of this, we now have the ubiquitous network connectivity, mobile devices and the social media.

I am very active in the social media because I frankly like it as a medium of communication. I try to use it carefully and responsibly, but my wife complains that I overuse it, like while driving 🙂 I listened and rarely tweet while driving, and if I do, I use voice to text services such as Jott to tweet. Tweeting is very hard – trying to communicate everything you want in 140 characters or less is not that easy.

However, with one such tweet, I have the potential to get the attention of a significant number of my followers. Where I see the most value is in those tweets from the ones that I have chosen to follow (which I have done very carefully). Sometimes, they have done the work for me – combing the internet and filtering some of the most interesting bits of information. I use this a lot and I acknowledge this either through retweets or thanking them privately.

I also use Facebook a lot. Since I have not taken the time to segregate my friends into various groups and target communications to groups, I have to be extremely careful about what I say. I have some of my professional friends as well as family and (social) friends watching the same thing I say. This restraint I feel is good and makes me think before saying something really stupid (which I have done a few times).

I am on foursquare, linked in, groupon and a lot more that I don’t even know any longer. I sign up, test them out and find them not interesting or suitable and move on. In many of these cases, intentionally they make getting out next to impossible, so I leave my account hanging there.

So, what should be our advice to our users on all these? First off, I think, we should educate our students on the appropriate use and behavior in the social media. This is not a technology issue as much as technologists collaborating with other offices such as student life to have a program. It will be interesting to prepare and deliver this whole education program using the social media itself!

There are numerous examples of the use of social media in teaching and learning. For an interesting article on this subject, I would refer you to Social Networking in Higher Education by Bryan Alexander from NITLE. While you are there, browse some of the related articles in the “The Tower and the Cloud” an EDUCAUSE e-book.

Of course, the adoption of these tools in teaching and learning depends on the willingness of the teacher and if and whether these tools add any value to the process. These are questions that are being hotly debated. I thought, rather than me listing the examples I know, I would invite the readers of this blog to comment on some of the best applications of social media in teaching and learning as comments.

Also, if you are asked by faculty member the question of “Should I use it?” what would be your advice?

So, let us get some interesting use cases listed here for the benefits of everyone – let the crowdsourcing begin!