Busting Myths, talking about Legends and declaring Truths in Episode #11 speeded up time in an amazing way so we just had to get back to the social media discussion – which we definitely did in this grand Sequel Episode #12!
A Hangouts Pro joined us!
This time Tiina, Alastair and me – and Kim! – were joined by a true US Hangouts pro Chad LaFarge who, apart from many interesting views on social media, gave us (hopefully!) free and very valuable Hangouts support when we were struggling to get the party started. Thanks a ton Chad, I’m looking forward to that interview you (almost) promised me! You can trust me to get back to you about this :)
Education + social media = true
Social media is a part of our connected society but the way it’s tackled in education varies hugely – interestingly enough both in the US and most of the Nordic area, it seems. Tiina pointed out that the new Finnish curriculum presently in the works states that the teachers are required to get connected so it will not be a matter of choice any longer. Alastair added that, even though all Swedish schools have Internet access and quite a bit of gear, there is still lots of blocking of the major social media sites going on which obviously makes it pretty hard to use them when working with the students! A part of my own take was that if a school does not have a voice in the media, it will be gunned down by the mob when things heat up; a fact we have noticed very clearly on my home turf.
Ghost Towns and Bustling Cities
We also touched on the similarities and differences of Facebook and the well known Ghost Town(?!) Google+ and, of course, pretty much everyone (apparently except me) is on Facebook so it sure has an incredible reach. However, G+ has many interesting features – like HangoutsOnAir, for one! – and the long form posts there have often very good quality, providing you have your ‘circles’ set up properly. I’m looking forward to using G+ in education since it is now included in the Google Apps for Education package; no ads and easy administration sounds really good to me.
Twitter sucks! Or not?
Finally, we never had time to get into the major argument about Twitter! Alastair lives and breathes Twitter and I hate it (well, actually I don’t, not quite..) so there should be some interesting discussions ahead… Stay tuned everyone, especially Helene :)
Audio-only available
As usual, you can listen to the audio-only version of the show through the web – or download the roughly 50Mb mp3 file, in case you’d prefer that – using this link.
See you folks On Air!
DViS: Sverige för Ukraina 