Social Media And Education: The Whole Unit

I keep reading about schools adding social media degrees and about new courses in social media being offered from schools all over the country lately. Whether they are a local college like Southern New Hampshire University or Harvard Business School, the news makes me cringe.

You’d think the news would make me happy. The more social media is accepted as a profession the easier it should be to do my job, right? Wrong! Social media is not a profession, a discipline or a vocation and it is not where the focus of my work lies. It is only a part of the whole picture. Teaching it as separate encourages wrong-thinking about what it is and how it should be used.

Social media (and again, I prefer to call it adaptive media) is a whole business solution. It can not be separate to find success, especially in a small business environment. To teach that it is a stand alone thing in our schools is doing us all a disservice.

Social Media is only a versatile tool, not a discipline or vocation.

Social Media is one part of a whole business and education solution.

Social Media implementation must be shared across departments and integrated into classrooms – it is not it’s own silo.

The first place to teach social media as a part of a whole business is to implement it in action in every classroom and administrative department and teach by doing, using the whole set of tools as they evolve instead of parting out the process and isolating it, which goes against the grain of what these tools are great for – building bridges, connecting and collaborating.

For more on social media in the classroom, see this post with slide decks and more information.