University Social Media Meeting the Demands of Enterprise 2.0

Social Media for Higher Education and the Workplace of Tomorrow

How is going to alter how education is done?

The world is changing beneath our feet. Dan Tapscott in his book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” correctly emphasizes, “Increasingly employees are using blogs, wikis, and other new tools to collaborate and form ad hoc communities across departmental and organizational boundaries…We are shifting from close and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.” This massive shift in organization management and employee roles and skill sets is driven by the collaborative social media tools Tapscott eludes to. What does this mean for students, education, and 21st century classrooms? How does new era of education 2.0 change the role of the learner and educator?

Digital Learning (Solving Garbage In Garbage Out) Initially, students need to be provided with opportunities to learn. RSS feeds are free means of educations. Its up to educators to help university students to navigate the upcoming information overload. Dashboards, aggregation, advanced search engine research is absolutely critical to prosper in our information economy. These tools can help separate the wheat from the chaff, and with the upcoming information explosion, this skill is at a premium and worth its weight in gold. More importantly college students will need to learn how to consumer, organize, repurpose, remix, and create content so they can compete in the next generation of communication environment.

Web 2.0 technologies are transforming the learning process for students. Blogs are increasingly covering issues where print media like newspapers and magazines leave off. Blogs also provide a unique personal touch and the social media environment provides for radical experimentation. Learning and working is increasing collaborative and virtual. Teams across the worlds are being assembled, created, and optimized with digital tools. Workers across the globe are leveraging tools like Salesforce for customer service management and Basecamp for project management for creative, marketing, and leadership activities. Make no mistake, this change is as critical as email and students that don’t get it will be fundamentally left on the other side of the digital divide. Increasingly, job seekers who don’t understand software as service (SaaS), cloud computing, and wikis will be sitting in the unemployment line or flipping burgers. As part of the digital information economy, the engines of tomorrow’s growth and innovation, Gen X and Gen Y will fundamentally be on platforms of collaboration leveraging social media technologies to solve tomorrow’s global problems.

Clearly, integrating social media collaboration and communication tools into the 21st century higher education curriculum is critical for our students to adapt to the world of tomorrow. Are you preparing your students to meet the challenges of the 21st century? Are they ready to successfully engage with blogs, wikis, and virtual collaboration platforms? Just using old school communication skills without understanding the web 2.0 strategic environment and its core technologies will leave job seekers behind who can’t agilely utilize this recruiting and human resources 2.0 era.