When it comes to higher education, and specifically to college students, I like to think of social media as a campus dining hall — the conversation part, not the food part.Twenty years ago, when the World Wide Web was a toddler and the term "social media" hadn't been invented yet, students met in the dining hall or the student union to eat and talk — about who they were dating, who they wanted to date, the parties they attended last weekend, how drunk they got at the parties last weekend, their classes and, of course, their professors.
They still do that, but now those conversations also can (and do) happen on Facebook and Twitter, where anyone can "hear" them, not just the guys at the next table at dinner. One person listening is Matt Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa, who last month started searching out and retweeting students' tweets about their professors (check out all such posts on Twitter with the hashtag #myprofessor). As he notes in a blog on the Inside Higher Ed website, the tweets are an unfiltered look at how students view their professors, for better or for worse.
Will professors listen to their students' praise/complaints on Twitter? Should they?
(Photo from Microsoft Office Images)
This is a really great analogy. There are also websites that function like social media, but aren't officially labeled social media like Ship Underground. Part of me wishes people still met up in dining halls and on campus to talk about things instead of always on Facebook, Twitter or texting. I almost wish I could have come to college before all of that got popular to see how different the dynamics are.
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