The Education System gets serious about Social Media. Community Managers extend past Corporate
I’m excited for Mark Krupinski who has accepted a role as a Community Manager at Rasmussen Colleges. He’s been an advocate of social media and has had a somewhat frustrating experience at his previous company who simply, well, didn’t get it. Apparently Rasmussen is not like that, they encourage him to be creative, reach to the community and want him to experiment with other interaction devices that could increase education results, interactive environments like SecondLife.
While community is nothing new in the collegiate experience, for a the formal web organization of an educational group to start thinking about these tools for education is fantastic. Setting up tools so that students can learn from each other, share information, interact, argue and connect. Since this is the way we’re expected to perform in the future workplace, why should we limit it only there? I’ve seen some tools that Mark will be sure to look at in the Web 2.0 arena focused on Education.
Congrats to Mark, and Congrats to Rasmussen colleges for creating such a modern, interesting, and effective role.
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Most educational institutions are worse than clueless. I pitched an Honors College Blog to my alma mater a few months ago. I showed them how empty that space is, how they could be THE Honors College for social media savvy students, and how they could better keep staff, students and alumni in touch.
They believed me.
And still they did nothing.
Jeremiah and Mark, how often do you think it is a belief problem vs. a implementation problem? And Mark, how are you approaching this twin challenges?
Brian
Understanding and ideas are everywhere, implementation is few and far in between.
I for one am hoping and praying that WEB 2.0 takes off for Education.
I own the domain name EDUCATION.TV, I can’t think of a better name for an education related company that will make use of WEB 2.0 tools!!!
With Demand Media starting their promotion of the .TV extension on Tuesday 1st May - it is indeed exciting times for everyone who has an interest in Web 2.0!!
Interesting Jeremiah; my wife, who is a senior school teacher at our local high-school (Brisbane, Australia) pod-casts her lessons for her students to listen to later (all students at the school have laptops) and regularly uses video and blogging content as educational tools. Very soon she has plans to potentially deploy her homework assignments on a blog so her students can use RSS to subscribe to their homework.
Having a tablet PC helps her mark, all drafts and homework assignments are emailed directly to her Exchange email she uses Word’s “inking” to mark the work and emails it back.
Honest to god!
My point is that while using web 2.0 technology in the classroom is very exciting, its already happening. This is the logical outcome of web 2.0 bridging the chasm.
@James : The only problem I can see with hosted web 2.0 tools is (at least in Australia) schools have strong IP concerns (all work done by all students is the students own intellectual property) and the school must take all steps to ensure its protection. Many Australian schools are also burdened by a lack in Internet connection speed. In my wife’s case the school has significant on-site hardware and bandwidth to spare, but is very sensitive to privacy.
Perhaps developing a server environment which allowed schools to host the tools themselves “behind the firewall” like a enterprise customer would be a better business modal AND circumvent these issues. But then again, I can only speak from Australia’s point of view, and perhaps this is not the case with the US.
mmm….all very exciting, and I can tell you from personal experience that as a media 2.0 junkie - its so great to see my lovely wife cutting up that days lesson and converting them to MP3 for the students