Social Media Pedagogy: How Do You Manage the Firehose?

So, how do you help students digest a FIREHOSE spewing new apps, concepts, and strategies that "flow in" and "flow out" of the social web to power the social enterprise?

After teaching emerging technologies for a decade, and three years of focused thinking about how to teach about the social web, I'm just beginning to articulate a method for how to make this "mass" of seemingly disparate concepts, technologies, and movements make sense to students ...

First, you make sure that students understand enabling technologies & concepts that make applying these principles possible.  Absent an understanding of TCP/IP, network architecture, the client-server model, and databases, students are at risk for viewing social media as separate from the broader ecosystem of technologies that enable the social enterprise. Lacking an understanding of technology ecosystems, it's hard for students to think strategically about the Social Web - or any other technology - for that matter.

Second, you help students to understand the history of the Web and social media.  You leverage work from the history of science, economics, computing, and sociology to help listeners understand how features of new technology, and the implications of those features, shape user uptake of the tool & its broader implications for firms success.  More importantly, this step helps students to think critically about new technologies and drivers of their success.

Third, you start with Web 2.0 principles & associated business models. You illustrate how O'Reilly's principles play out in the Social Web ... you explain how Web 2.0 principles are dynamic and must be re-assessed as the technologies evolve ... you connect those principles to Web 1.0 as a means to illustrate why business models are important ... You provide students opportunities to see the principles in action - through making them analyze the long tail embedded in matchmaking sites ... picking apart how data became the "intel inside" for a reinvigorated MySpace.com.  You let them get their hands dirty with in-class and outside of class exercises.

Fourth, you let the students engage with social media.  By this point, you hope, that the kids realize that the Social Web is more than simply marketing.  You hope that they view the "social web" is part of a uninterrupted string of innovations that have reframed how humans interact, economically, politically, and as communities.  You turn them loose to decompose "social" business models & get them thinking about how to use the Social Web to effect change in organizations and society ... and how to use it to create value for themselves and people around them.

Finally, you never forget that you, the old guy at the front of the classroom, will be hard pressed to keep up with the kids - that for the kids - the IT-enabled virtual social web is interwoven with their daily lives - that these kids have grown up with social and it is part of their DNA.  So, that as you move your students from point one to four, you have to leverage their knowledge, their experiences, and understanding to better inform your personal understanding of the social enterprise ... and if you don't, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant ...