More detailed notes from my talk at Western Sydney TAFE in late 2009

1. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
1 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
There are three areas that are relevant to both our society in general and to us as
educators in particular. They are: (1) the overall landscape in which we are operating;
(2) the social implications of the changes being driven by technology and how we are
using it; and (3) the changing models that are beginning to impact on educational
practice.
Landscape
Before we leap into a look at the landscape it is important to clarify some things about
web 2.0 and some key trends that are impacting on the landscape. Key points about
web 2.0 are that:
1. It is not new technology – the technology stack is decades old in many cases
2. It is new ways of using older technology – we are putting the technology
together differently enabled by reasonable broadband access
3. It is not using the old mindset where technology was the province of gurus –
now any script kiddie can make things happen with technology
4. It is democratizing technology – this is breaking down the old cabals of
experts
5. It is applying new business models – we are seeing this with companies like
Google and Facebook
In terms of the broader landscape I have identified five macro trends that are shaping
both computing and our world at present:
• Next Generation Internet – semantics, contextual, geo-aware
• New interfaces – gesture, haptic, auditory, human-computer, voice user
interfaces
• Hardware - Virtualization , cloud computing enabled by solid state drives,
blade technology
• Social computing - It’s here and it will continue to grow
• Ubiquitous computing - Wearable, networks, convergence
Of these I will concentrate on social computing and the next generation internet as
they are driving a lot of change that is impacting on the education sector.
But probably the biggest change over the past thirty years is the rate of change. Once
it was completely acceptable to wait a week for a letter to arrive, to ponder one’s
response for a few days and then write and dispatch a letter by post. Then the fax
machine changed all of that. Now we receive emails immediately followed by a phone
call asking why we have not yet responded.
The pace of change is increasing and has increased substantially over the past 30
years. Look at the mobile phone as an example of this. From the time the telephone
was invented until the mid-1980s it remained recognisably the same device. Now, to a
person who last saw a telephone in 1980, the iPhone or SmartPhone would not even
seem to be in the same family of devices. And, indeed they are not. The modern
mobile phone is really converged computing, telecommunications and entertainment
device. They even have more memory than my first server.
The next thing to consider is the revolution of the internet. Originally conceived as a
bulwark against nuclear war and as a way for academic researchers to communicate it

2. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
2 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
has reshaped the world. Now many people use the internet every day as an integral
part of their lives – for sending email, chatting online, shopping, entertainment and
business.
Along with this growth in the pragmatic use of the internet, social networks are also
becoming mainstream; with Pew Research from 2009 showing 46% of US adults have
used a social network at least once, and 27% used one yesterday.
This area of social computing has been the real area of growth and the data clearly
shows how social computing is changing how ordinary people share, communicate
and interact.
Some examples of these changes include:
• In the past email and search engine internet traffic exceeded that of social
networks. However, in December 2009 search traffic and social network
traffic approached parity in Australia for the first time.
• Also previously in late 2007, social network traffic surpassed that from email
in the UK for the first time.
• And adult website traffic was also overtaken by social networking traffic for
the first time in late 2008.
The important thing to note here is that the behaviours of searching, sending emails or
checking out p~rn did not change. What changed is the location in which it happens.
Thus if you are in Facebook and so are all of your friends it simply does not make
sense to leave the application to use another email client.
There has also been development of niche networks for different interest groups. For
business there are LinkedIn and Plaxo (amongst many others) and Facebook is
winning the war as the de facto social network for everyone else.
Another interesting characteristic of this landscape is that ordinary people are creating
and participating online in ways that were once unthinkable. Without specialised
technical assistance people are creating videos to share on YouTube or Viddler; they
are creating blogs on Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad; they are sharing photos on
Facebook or Flickr. Remixing music or visual materials is rife –questions of
provenance and copyright remain unanswered. Video downloads, online shopping,
banking and travel arrangements are becoming the norm.
Against this backdrop various researchers have mapped the generations:
• GI Generation aged 73+
• Silent Generation aged 64-72
• Older Boomers aged 55-63
• Younger Boomer aged 45-54
• Gen X aged 33-44
• Gen Y aged 18-32
And, while the notion of dividing up the population on the basis of age cohorts is
useful for analytical purposes, it ignores some simple facts about people. In each age
cohort is a bell curve for change adoption – with some members as early adopters, the
mass as early and late majority, followed by the laggards. I fundamentally disagree
with the idea that mere membership of an age cohort determines a person’s

3. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
3 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
relationship to technology or propensity to adopt change. Rather the determining
factor will become one’s willingness to be connected.
This willingness and desire to be hyperconnected via technology will become the new
generation gap. A great example of this is the loose confederation of people who
meetup on Thursday mornings on the northside of Sydney for coffee. Most of them
met originally on Twitter, decided that they liked each other and thought it would be
good to catch up informally for coffee.
What has happened is that this has created a vibrant group of people who know each
other in real life now. Business ideas are exchanged, family and social tips are shared
and other connections are made and broadened. More can be seen at their Posterous
site at www.nscm.posterous.com . Many similar groups all around Australia – I have
attended them in Surry Hills Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.
What is interesting here is that online and offline activities are blurring and the
boundaries between public and private are no longer clear. The conflicts between the
connected and the unconnected are already being seen in schools, colleges and
workplaces around the world. Just try asking members of your class to turn off their
mobile phones to test this hypothesis.
Social implications
The social implications for all of this are astounding. They reverberate across all areas
of life from business to education to socialising.
This technology and the way it is being used now is creating massive interconnections
between people and enabling the creation of groups and communities. This kind of
community building and collaboration is similar to that we experienced when living in
smaller villages rather than in large cities.
But think on this – the children of today will stay in loose contact with every group of
people the meet throughout their lives from kindergarten onwards. It is going to be a
challenge to manage over a lifetime. The only way to manage these masses of loose
connections is by chunking them up into niches. This is where richer technologies that
enable this to happen seamlessly based on use rather than manually based on effort.
Another feature of this interconnected world we live in is that we no longer need to
wait. Delayed gratification is becoming a thing of the past in many respects. For
example in the area of entertainment we used to wait for a movie to come out or wait
until our favourite television show was broadcast. But now with the advent of decent
broadband and streaming video there is no more waiting. Anyone can watch what
they want when they want. And they do exactly that, as anyone with teenagers in the
house with a broadband connection knows all too well.
However, against the backdrop of this explosion in connections, information and
entertainment at our fingertips we remain unreconstructed human beings. This
remains similar to our cave dwelling days.

4. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
4 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
We still retain our tribal brains that work best in small groups the size of a basketball
team. Our brains are wired to deal with small chunks of information – like the magic
number seven, which is the number of items we can retain in our short-term memory.
Also we are constrained in our ability to handle a great many close relationships.
Many cite Dunbar's number which is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of
individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the
kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person
relates socially to every other person.
Imagine how many contacts you would have if everyone you had ever met since
kindergarten was a friend on Facebook. This is precisely what is happening to our
young people today.
This means that we need to chunk up all of those massive networks we collect so as to
manage them over time. It also means that we are maintaining increasingly loose ties
with larger numbers of people.
Ultimately we are social creatures and want to create social networks either on or
offline. I often use the example of Facebook, where ordinary people of all ages are
routinely creating affiliation groups. These online groups are even creating real life
relationships – for example the Twitter community in Sydney often meets up
physically with most of us having met online originally.
Another element to the mix is the amount of information we are required to process
everyday - email, news, social networks, entertainment, etc. We can no longer store
all of this information in our heads.
This is not merely a gratuitous picture of Brad Pitt. It harks back to a time in the
past when our societies used epic poetry to store and transmit important information,
but now it is all in nearline or online storage. For example, many of us no longer
recall the phone numbers of our nearest and dearest since they are stored so handily in
our mobile phones.
Also the question of how we are going to retrieve a lot of that information in the
future is open to question. I’ve got a floppy disk at home with some interesting photos
of a data centre I built a few years ago, but no longer have any technology to access
that information.
Changing models
So where does all of this put us as educators? There are some who talk of a nirvana
where all students are self directed learners and we are coaches and facilitators. But I
suspect that those people have not met some of my students.
Let’s look back to the web 2.0 meme map from O’Reilly’s Foo Camp a few years
ago. It clearly talks about all of the things that have become part of social computing
(and this includes social media and social networking).
The social web has developed a set of values based on that original web 2.0 meme
map and the following Wordle map shows some of those enacted in social computing
at present.

5. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
5 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
But teaching has its own longstanding set of values. And today we are seeing a
conflict between those two sets of values in classrooms and lecture halls around the
world.
But first a few comments on the nature of these new tools. These tools are a great
enabler for minority groups. It levels the playing field for them in many ways.
However, it is well to note, as Grady Booch once said: “a fool with a tool is still a
fool”.
Our learning institutions are sometimes slow to change and adapt to new ways. On the
other hand teachers are often the ones in vanguard embracing change and pushing the
boundaries. The institutions of learning in this country are pretty conservative and
slow to adopt new fangled technology, usually quite sensibly on the basis of cost. But
now with web 2.0 social computing and open source the main arguments against new
technology adoption are being destroyed.
Individual teachers are embracing change, but sometimes when I meet these visionary
folks they seem more like revolutionary cells of the vanguard than part of the
institutional mainstream. But the learners will eventually force our hands by
disengaging if we do not respond to the shifts in their cultural practices.
This leads into another area of contention, that of boundaries. These new tools are
creating disputes about the appropriate times and places where it is appropriate to use
the technology (for example, have you ever tried to get a Gen Y class to turn off their
mobile phones?). Also questions about the content and authority of information

6. Social Media & its Implications for Education 2009
6 © Copyright Kate Carruthers 2009 www.katecarruthers.com
created or shared. Think about the endless discussions about plagiarism and the
appropriateness of Wikipedia as a research authority.
We are dealing with a radically different set of expectations – from our staff,
administrators and students (or consumers). Many of these people were socialised in
the old non-digital world; while others are digital natives.
As part of my preparation for this session I’ve been trying to distil my thoughts on the
implications of new technology on culture and learning. And for me it has all come
down to sensemaking as the purpose of education. Dan Russell provides a nice
definition of sensemaking: “Sensemaking is in many ways a search for the right
organization or the right way to represent what you know about a topic. It’s data
collection, analysis, organization and performing the task.”
To a certain extent I think that these changes mean we need to become co-participants
in the learning experience. Become facilitators of the process rather than the experts.
This does not mean that our experience or empirical knowledge is not valuable. We
need to establish mutual respect and open dialogue. And luckily now we have the
technological tools to facilitate that dialogue.
It is going to be an interesting balancing act between those different sets of
expectations. Defining boundaries in a hyperconnected world is a challenge, but it is
worth remembering that interesting discoveries are made at the boundaries of the
currently known world. Some of the tools to help with this sense-making process are
to embrace the values of web 2.0 as part of classroom practice.
But the challenges to the authority of the teacher and of the institution are not only
coming from students and society in general. They are also coming from competitors.
By this I mean the institutions that are subverting traditional ideas of the university or
college and putting their intellectual property out online for free. The institutions
doing this include the august (e.g. Stanford, MIT) as well as the ambitious (e.g. USQ)
as Lifehacker so kindly lists.
Other challenges are coming because of the radical transparency that the web enables.
Here I’m thinking of things like Rate My Teacher and Rate My Professor. No more
hiding from bad appraisals by students it’s all out in the open now. But looking on the
bright side it’s happening to kittens as well.
All of this brings us tremendous opportunities as both a society and as educators. It
seems like we’re not in control any more. But I do question if the control we once had
was merely an illusion. And I wonder if this new world might not be a healthier one
for all of us?
The biggest shift is that we are dealing with connected individuals who are at the
centre of a web of networks enabled and mediated by technology. This will give rise
to power shifts that we will need to live through and embrace in order to survive.
Note: all data mentioned above is detailed in my slides here
http://www.slideshare.net/carruthk/social-learning-implications