Technology and learning

The use of social media by participants in the recent disturbances in the UK has highlighted how difficult is to to predict how new technologies may be applied or which groups will adopt them.

Nicole Ames of Boston University School of Management has challenged her students to build a social media cloud marketing plan for IBM - who provided materials to kick start the project.  Five student teams analysed Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, search engine optimisation and mobile marketing to recommend strategic approaches for IBM.  Interestingly, they went off-brief to comment on the IBM web site - another example of users taking control of the agenda in unexpected ways.

While Nicole Ames and her students are having fun with the media, other schools are experimenting with the hardware.  Many schools are now pre-loading content, including case studies. on to tablet devices.  So far the iPad is coming out ahead of Kindle in student satisfaction surveys.  These are necessary early steps but more interesting stuff is yet to come as schools move beyond providing access to content and start to explore the pedagogic possibilities of instant interaction within and without the classroom, within and without the student body.

All experience of technological roll-out suggests that while schools may have an agenda for how the devices should be used, students will speedily begin to adapt use to their own purposes.  Social media, unlike the more traditional push media like print, empowers users and challenges existing structural hierarchies.  Such as, for example, the traditional role of the teacher.

While the attributes of the case method approach should play well in the new environments, traditional lecturing will be more challenged.