The challanges with Social media in education

I have put together all the challanges we have experienced when we started to use social media within our Entreprenoeurship education. We have tried different social medias, and we have built the whole education at internet.

- Focus at one tool if the aim is to build something. Use several tools if the purpose is to do marketing. LindkedIn and Facebook is good for marketing, but not if you're going to build an education or collect a lot of information.

- If the social media doesn’t work as planned, drop it and try a new one. We tried to build an education in LinkedIn, but our participants found it to difficult to manage. It is important to have an easily administered tool. It was important for us because we wanted a lot of people to use the tool and we also wanted the participants to learn each other how to use it.

- The things you write or put into social media don’t need to be perfect, it’s simply a part of the training and it also opens the opportunity for other people to reflect, comment, and the participants uses each others skills to make things better and better.

- It is important to have a clear goal - where are we going? To have control over process is impossible when you introduce many participants into the development process. We have seen clearly how the process has taken a different path than we had expected, but we re still moving towards the target.

- This process came to an end (if processes can) in the end of may and we decided to complete
the education, with 100 steps, all published in social media.

The basic idea of a Manual

The idea to produce a Manual is to provide hands-on guidance to anyone who would like to introduce social media as means to support learning. Geographical or maybe social ones could be the reason why someone would choose an Internet based solution in the first place, but may not be the only reasons. Sometimes learning is more fun this way even if you sit next to your chum... :-)

Anyway, the Manual is meant to be practical and straight-forward. This is what we did; this worked; this didn't work as well as we had hoped...

Ok?

The backbone of the Manual as agreed in Akureyri is in place in Google Docs; for us to suggest changes in. Maybe a little early right now, but not for long as Rucola is now on the prowl! :-)

Good luck to us!