Academic Uses of Social Media

The conference: The mini conference took place on Tuesday, May 3, 2011. It was co-sponsored by Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs, at Oberon Meeting Room, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge. Program, Webcast

Nancy Koehn Business Harry Lewis Computer Science Greg Mankiw Economics Michael Sandel Government

11:45 Judy Singer, Education Welcome 12:00 John Palfrey, Law Introduction 12:10 Danah Boyd, Microsoft Culture of Connectivity 13:00 Faculty Panel: (list left) Academic Uses of Social Media 14:00 Perry Hewitt,Communications: Social Media at Harvard

A few bits from the conference: (paraphrased pretty freely by myself. Far from verbatim):

• Judy Singer: Big question: "How does technology influence the way we teach?" We need to bring together resources from across the university.
• John Palfrey about social media: Strong growth of usage of social media is undisputed. Not all students come with equal set of abilities. How do we cope with this? Get into the mix and experiment.
• Danah Boyd about privacy: the public and private domains have blurred. Privacy is what you want to keep to yourself. It is a reversed world: "I want to communicate with the world but do not want my mother reading it". Interactions are pubic by default and private by choice. Privacy is rejected but intimacy embraced, sharing is often done without giving much information. Some shape their profile like Angelie Jolie: "The more I throw into the public, the less the public looks at things I want to keep private".
• Danah Boyd: we have opportunities to learn about media literacy and the process of content creation. Sites like Wikipedia are living documents. Many academics refuse to open their thoughts online but expect this from their students. The public space is an amazing opportunity to get feedback.
• Nancy Koehn: Facebook is big business: it has 600 Million users and expects a billion in 6 months. Companies like Dr Pepper have 8 million facebook fans, Starbucks 12 million. But we know much less than we think. An analogy: when the railroad appeared early pictures imagined stage coach carts on tracks. When the telephone was patented, it was used as a office intercom, Altair was considered a hobbyist device. We don't know how to use social network technology yet. The technology outstrips our learning models. We need "rapid fire experimentation". The challenge is to translate knowledge into understanding and understanding into knowledge. Also telephone, Recording, newspaper business experience rapid changes in their business models. Higher education could be affected similarly. We need to stay ahead of the curve and should not become too comfortable.
• Greg Mankiv who has Facebook and blogging experience turned off facebook when limitations were reached. His blog helps to distribute information, it pleases his publishers and allows to answer questions to journalists in a convenient way. It is also to stay in contact with readers and students without email spam, and add things which can not be done in the classroom. Mankiv had to turn off comments however. [This confirms that the topic is very scale dependent: something might work with a few dozen readers per day but no more when thousands of visitors per day are reached. Journals like the Los Angeles times had to make this experience too.]
• Michael Sandell: experimented with open access to the classroom. How close can we replicate online the experience to be there? Dispense of information as a public service has the advantage of a new public space. Encourage discussion about topics. See different views. Students at Harvard connect with students elsewhere.
• Harry Lewis who is an "ambivalent" blogger realized that blogging can take a lot of time and that there can be concerns about throwing out unfinished and unpolished thoughts. Two other issues with social media: we see a generation which enters college together with all their social network. We also witness rapid changes to the role of libraries and archives which led to a sidetrack discussion about publishing and open access and support.

Two questions did not come up to which I would love to hear an answer to:

• Are there no concerns about third party social media tools like twitter, google, facebook, linkdin, wolfram, turnitin which mine higher education, scouting talent for head hunters, harvest fresh ideas and possibly patent them?
• What happens with long term information management? Social network pages are young and transform fast. Some die quickly or get bought a few years after they have started, possibly taking all their data with them or (worse!) harvest them for other purposes to which the original customer did not agree.

To summarize the conference: we have no clue how social media will influence higher education in the future. It is clear however that it already has a major impact on higher education; more "rapid fire" experimentation and "opening up" is needed to find out what works and what does not work.

Who was the best of the 4 panelists? For me, Nancy Koehn from the business school impressed most. While the other three reported on blogging, television and facebook experiments and reported extremely valuable experiences, Koehn made clear that much of it is also business and the new developments could have enormous impact on higher education, that experimentation is needed. Danah Boyd showed with her research how the landscape has changed. Questions from the public made clear that also a healthy portion of caution is needed. Opening up information does not mean that the classroom should not be kept a safe place, where ideas can be bounced without that a third party has access to it and makes it to gold. A side track discussion about copyright, the role of libraries and open access models for journals would merit a separate conference.