I had a great chat with Peter Baron today about the role of social-media in schools. It was one of those heady dialogs. It reminded me a little (a bit fondly) of the 90's where everyone was getting hyped-up about networking and web for schools.

It struck me as a bit uncanny how this emergent movement feels so much like the last one. There's lots of enthusiasm, many champions and big ideas and yet there is an equally palpable sense of anxiety and wariness of the whole thing.

We covered a lot of ground and much of it echoed by a great post by Antonio Viva. Here's a redux of a couple of main themes.

Social-media in Teaching & Learning. It is not about the technologies or the applications. The meta-narrative here is that schools, teachers, educators need to forget about teaching technology skills. That is to say the focus of social-media in the classroom should not be about skill acquisition--teaching kids how to mash buttons on a computer to upload videos or download pictures. They already know how to learn this stuff, and if they don't, they'll figure it out quickly.

Social-media (and Web 2.0+) is praxis--it is about putting the theory of interconnected-learning into practice. Social-media puts the 'project' in project-base-learning and it creates the natural public spheres for discourse amongst students. And, social-media makes critical thinking fun, analytical writing meaningful, and deep-learning visible.

Social-media is not the new frontier of education. It is the frontier. It is the basis of the canvas upon which all ideas will be developed, shaped, communicated and exchanged. This isn't like teaching students MS Word so that they know how to wordprocess their papers in college. This is fundamentally about using tools to engage students in a way that was never possible.

Think of this as Socratic Dialog 2.0. Except, Socrates had a stick to draw in the ground. We can draw in virtual space.

Social-media and Marketing. The problem with traditional marketing is that, inevitably, you can't help feeling manipulated if you are on the consumer-end of the "relationship". This isn't because marketers set out to lie (although some do), it is because the balance of power in the relationship is overwhelmingly in the corner of the marketer--it's not that we don't trust the message, it is that we don't trust the messenger because there is no intersubjectivity in the process.

Traditional marketing posits companies and consumers as "us vs. them". It's not surprising that when the relationship is "adverserial" truth and truthiness merge into an indistinguishable mess. We hate being 'sold' to, and yet we accept it as the price to pay for awareness. Social-media flips that on its head. Social-media is all about 'we'--the intersubjective. Truth claims can be validated instantly; consumers now have real power prior to the sale. Case in point, the Motrin fiasco.

Today, marketing needs to be more than brand awareness (this is why Motrin blew it), it is about building social-capital or good-feelings. In some parts of the world, this is already the basis of normal business. Take home message: If you are in a school and you are scared out of your wits about being exposed? Take heed, if you aren't part of the conversation, you aren't part of the relationship!