Twitter 101: Social Media's Move to College Classrooms

Before the meeting, Andrews remarked via his Twitter, "True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say 'I would die if I had to live here!'" FedEx employees, also on Twitter, not surprisingly took offense on behalf of their beloved city. Within days, word got out about this PR blunder to business, public relations, social media blogs and to executives at FedEx and Ketchum. Oops.

Perhaps Andrews could have used a social media course to understand the implications of his "tweet." Now such courses are readily available. Indeed, the importance of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and countless other social networking sites to mainstream culture and communication has businesses (or at least their PR and marketing departments) and journalistic organizations alike driving demand for social media instruction in the college curriculum.

My generation has grown up with the Internet, and while most social media users probably think they're proficient, do we fully grasp the full extent of their function and value? Pitfalls and uncertainty seem to be the impetus for social media education.

Howard Rheingold, who has taught at UC Berkeley in the recent past as well as at Stanford University, is widely credited with inventing the term "virtual community." He has written numerous books on the subject. In the course outline for the Virtual Communities/Social Media class he taught this spring, he summarizes the expected learning outcomes:

"Students will take away from this course a set of conceptual tools, a vocabulary, and an analytical framework with which to recognize, understand, and more effectively manage new social practices online, together with a familiarity with the literature regarding social media and identity, community, collective action, public sphere, social capital, networks, and social technology development."

While Rheingold's course on social media is meant to be just a component of a degree (sociology, for instance), England's Birmingham City University is offering a complete master's degree in social media, starting in September. The university's School of Media tells students who enroll in the year-long, full-time course to expect outcomes such as learning how to "become a social media consultant (and understand what that means); develop innovative and alternative media projects; enhance your skills and contribute to the development of new professional practice in PR, marketing communications and Web design; continue to develop a scholarly interest in social media as part of a further research degree."

Of course, many professors and administrative officials have implemented social media and other forms of networking in their recruitment and communication efforts for some time now. Since their students are already on Facebook and Twitter, it makes sense to use those platforms for their messages.

More recently, however, these applications have become educational tools in the classroom. University of Texas at Dallas history professor Monica Rankin uses Twitter in her classes to help encourage participation and organize and transmit topics, discussions and questions. Rankin refers to this effort as the "Twitter Experiment" and notes on her Web site, "Most educators would agree that large classes set in the auditorium-style classrooms limit teaching options to lecture, lecture, and more lecture. And most educators would also agree that this is not the most effective way to teach. I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material."

It is likely too early to gauge the effectiveness of these social media courses, degrees, and classroom experiments. Perhaps such endeavors are akin to, as a colleague recently mused, "a massively expensive For Dummies book." Our understanding of online culture will continue to evolve with or without academia's involvement, but it does beg the question: Should our institutions of higher education share some of the responsibility of explaining the online frontier of social media, or are its participants fully capable of self-management and adaptation? The answer may require more than 140 characters.