When two broadcasters on Twitter or some other social media connect in the common area and create a discussion is when the magic happens. This is what social media is all about, connecting with each other and talking!

I followed a debate over Bambuser about School 2.0 at Almedalen (a camp/convention for Swedish politics). Using Bambuser was a nice touch to such a debate and the online viewers were at the start included but later on forgotten but we had our own good chat in our channel.  The debate was of varying quality but made me think about some of the things they talked about.

The main thing they seemed to want to change in school 2.0 was a use of social media but unfortunately they missed the debate over what it would be used for. This miss is something I’ve noticed a lot lately, much discussion about social media but not over the uses for it. People need to focus more on the usability and why it’s important instead of just ”the tool”. Using social media won’t be of much use if you don’t know what you plan to use it for.

As someone commented, the debate would have made much more sense if it had been focusing on pedagogy 2.0 and how knowledge should be acquired in a new digital society. With the emergence of the information age less focus needs to be on ‘teaching out content’ and shifted towards more about ‘how to acquire information’. In the past the schools had an important job on passing on information from teacher to student since information was sparse and essential to remember. Today with our easy access to information it’s more important teaching people how to find the right information and filter out the rest.

Don’t focus on social media! Use social media as a tool to achieve something else. Together with a friend I’ve written a thesis about ”Organizational learning through the use of social media – A descriptive study of the feedback role in three Swedish organizations” where we focus on the use of social media and not the tool itself. The essay is available on Scribd for the ones interested in reading more about it.

[img: CC-NC-BY by Richard Cawood]

Found a great manifesto expressing how I feel towards the internet.

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don’t just hammer away and repeat and talk at people—talk TO people. It’s organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand—tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.                             -Maureen Johnson

To read more about this manifesto and see how it came to be go to Maureen’s blog post

[pic: cc-by-nc-sa greekadman]

With the emergence of new social media the gap between people seem to shrink. We share more and more about ourselves with each other over the internet and gossip has in many cases moved online. Keeping our social networks online allows us to keep track and in touch with more than the theoretical cognitive limit that we can have according to Dunbar’s number (even if we may not have a ’stable social relationship’ with most of them).

Another interesting aspect of when clusters of people in this size form is the effect it may have on a social scale. One example of a group’s altered properties compared to individuals is the Birthday paradox. An example of how this paradox works is that if one takes 36 random persons and researches if two of them share the same birthday the chance of that is not ~10% (36 persons & 365days) but closer to 90%. This is due to the number of increased combination’s that come with a larger group of people.

Another interesting theory to measure connections people have with each other is the six degrees of seperation. This theory claims that every person in the world knows another person through at the most six connections of ”friends of friends”.  This amplifies that we are much closer each other then what we normally perceive. Twitter has only four degrees of seperation, which partly explains why news travel so fast there.

Keep connecting with each other and enhance this social game we all play!

Social Media is relatively new for most people and many are still exploring the possibilities and uses of it. One of the things that happen with social media is that we become more transparent, we share more of our self to more people then we normally do. This transparency is good in some ways and less good in some.

There’s been several stories of sharing too much information on social media. One example is the case where a British women forgot she had befriended her boss on Facebook.

Another example is the recent case of a Swedish guy who published a picture of himself where he wore a cap with the text ”porn star”. His problem was that parents had seen the picture and the principal called him up and fired him from the childcare center he was working at.

When do people share too much information? I recently found the site pleaserobme.com which wants to make people aware of the risks of telling too much about themself to the world.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.

The website lists everyone that displays their status on Twitter as being away from home. Not in itself a dangerous feature but coupled with a quick search on the persons name on a site that lists where they live (e.g. hitta.se in Sweden) it’s an easy way to rob them without risk.

Keep being transparent but reflect on how and what you share with the world!