Tag Archives: social media

The Real Generation Gap

So how do people across different age groups use social media? An infographic that explores the differences in how various age groups use social media. As you might expect the teens do dominate social media, but it’s interesting to note that it is in the main adults who are using Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest.  This is certainly something to consider when using social media to support learning in a college environment.

The Real Generation Gap

Music students get serious with social networking

Music students get serious with social networking

The Excellence Gateway has another interesting and useful case study published in their website.

The use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace within the learning and skills sector divides educational professionals. Some feel that providers should embrace these Web 2.0 tools to increase engagement, others feel the casual and often frivolous content within these channels has no place in the classroom. The Music Department at City College Brighton and Hove has created its own Brighton Records Facebook, MySpace and Twitter sites to allow its students to brand and market their own work, as well as promote their skills to prospective employers. By emulating the professional deployment of Web 2.0 technologies prevalent in the music industry today, students have learnt how to make serious use of social networking sites, resulting in improved recruitment, retention, engagement and attainment.

Well worth reading.

The essence of these activities are transferable to other curriculum areas. Most industries recognise the need and importance of engaging with social media, though some do it better than others.


Using social media

Today I posted a couple of videos to the blog to demonstrate how quick and easy it is to use social media tools to create content and how RSS can be used to push that content to other sites, devices and even the VLE.

People have often said to me that they don’t have the time to engage with social media. Personally I think we are at the stage where you can’t afford not to. At the conference I was at today once more people were saying where do you find the time?

As I have said many times on this blog one of the core reasons I engage with social media is that it saves me time.

A recent example was when I was tasked with finding a particular e-safety video. A quick Google search did not turn anything up, so I posted to Twitter and was well pleased with the number and variety of responses I got.

Other examples include, posting photographs to Flickr, this means when someone asks to see photographs of the college or a particular piece of tech, then a quick e-mail and link will often suffice. More importantly as people know about my Flickr account they will go and look there without me even needing to worry about being involved.

The same goes for this blog, a place for me to set out my opinions, views and news. People can see what I am thinking and my recommendations, again without me needing to do too much once I have written the blog entry. Likewise if someone asks me for information, if I already have it on my blog, this can save time. Just a quick note about writing, one of the challenges that many people find is, finding the time to write or what to write about. I have found that it is easier to write lots than it is to write a little. This very blog entry has probably taken about twenty minutes, five minutes on the Tube on my iPhone and another fifteen minutes on the train on my laptop (used Evernote to transfer the text).

Another service I use is Delicious, a service that allows me to bookmark websites, a great way of organising my favourite websites. So if you want to know which websites I am looking at, Delicious allows you to do that.

Social media has the potential to make life easier and better, and like any tool, device or service, excessive use is not what it is about, it is about using the service to make life easier and better.

So what of the future?

Can you predict the future?

Do you know what life will be like next year, in five years, in ten years?

Over the last year or so I have been doing a few keynotes and presentations entitled the future of learning. I do start with a caveat that I don’t know the future for sure and that no one can really predict the future…

Though as a reflective person I do look back at the work I have been doing on mobile learning and I think there are lessons to be learned about the journey I have travelled.

This is me in 2006 based on work I was doing in 2004 and 2005.


This work came from mobile stuff I was doing back in the late 1990s. Back then I worked for an organisation called at-Bristol, a hands-on science centre in the middle of Bristol.

One of the projects we started working on was with HP looking at how we could use an HP Jornada on our then fledgingly wireless network to allow visitors additional and enhanced information on webpages about the exhibits. One of the key questions at the time was how we got the URLs into the devices at the right place. Then we decided to use HP’s Jetsend IR technology to “squirt” the URL to the Jornada. Of course since then the technologies have moved on and importantly so have the public. Today you would probably let the visitors use their own devices and smartphones. You would use QR codes, Bluetooth or more probably in the future RFID to find out where the visitor was before sending them the information (or letting them access the information via QR codes). If the attraction was outside then GPS could be used. The key though was not the technology but the concept of enhancing a visitor’s experience with additional content through a mobile device.

After leaving at-Bristol and joining the Western Colleges Consortium, I continued to work on mobile learning; at that time there was no funding available.

When I was working on mobile learning all those years ago, the reason was that mobile phones and mobile devices were becoming more sophisticated and more useful to consumers and business. I knew then it would only be a matter of time before they become useful to education and importantly a focus for policy and funding.

And in 2007 along came MoLeNET, millions of pounds of capital funding with a focus on mobile learning in FE.

There is no way that I would call myself a futureologist, but from an FE perspective I am looking at how new technologies can enhance and enrich everyday life, as before long these technologies will enter education.

So the big question is what am I working on now? What do I think will have a real impact in education, not just for learners, but also for funding and projects.

Well I am not working on Second Life or MUVEs. These do have some great application to learning, however until consumers start to use these technologies a lot more, than we won’t see a big change in their use in education.

Social networking and Web 2.0 are very big in the consumer field at the moment, Facebook is everywhere and corporate and entertainment use of these tools is now much more widespread than it was just a year or two ago.

As a result policymakers will start to think about how these tools and services can be used in education. And where thinking starts, funding usually follows…

So what about next year or the year after?

Well for me the “next big thing” is e-Books and e-Book Readers. These will hit the consumer market big time over the next three years. We will see many more people reading books, magazines and newspapers via devices such as the Apple iPad, Microsoft Courier and other devices not yet on the market. More publishers and broadcasters will start to think about how they are going to use these devices and start offering content on them, think of BBC iPlayer and its availability on the iPhone.

As a result policymakers will start to think about how these new technologies can be used in education. And where thinking starts, funding usually follows…

You see at the end of the day, it will not be how these products are used by educators, it’s how they are taken up and used by consumers and business. Whether that is right or wrong, is not really the case, as more often this is how it happens now, and has happened over the last twenty to thirty years, with most technologies.