Today Coleman tweeted that the Ministry of Education’s teachers’ day website was a risky move, and coincidentally at the time when I clicked on the link the one and only “careless” tweet appeared (screenshot courtesy of Coleman):
Teachersday.sg
Yes, I give MOE credit for trying something new and for experimenting, but there are still points to be made/lessons to learn:
1) It may have been the only negative tweet, but I think we need to think about these things. Who else will see these tweets besides the teachers? Other kids? Parents of kids? It’s entirely possible to get on to a service like Pheed.me and remove foul language in advance. And I think we need to be keenly aware of our target audience.
2) I understand that the purpose of keeping it uncensored was to maintain authenticity, but looking at the tweets that came out.. I’m not sure how many were just set up for the sole purpose of tweeting this one hashtag.
3) As Daphne points out, this web portal wasn’t largely publicised and therein lies why this was the only “careless” tweet. If more of the general public got to know about it, I bet it wouldn’t be long before tweets like “Miss Lim from [whatever] school I remember you for being such a b!tc# 20 years ago and I hope you’re still single #tday09” start appearing, and this turns into a #skittles fiasco – where people tagged on racist/malicious comments to the #skittles hashtag for everyone to see.
So for a moment, let’s forget this is the Ministry of Education (MOE), let’s forget that the people tweeting are predominantly kids, and let’s think about it in the real world:
First, while I don’t think the people who are involved are inexperienced or ignorant of social media, I think they jumped on the shiny object bandwagon without thinking it through. From their blog post:
If Facebook was the vehicle that brought social media to the mainstream, Twitter is the shiny new Ferrari F70 of the online space
Accurately said. I shiny new Ferrari isn’t an everyday, run-of-the-mill car. It’s like re-taking your drivers’ licence test again and making sure you understand the vehicle and can control it under all sorts of conditions, sunny or stormy.
Second, I know I’ll get some flak by being critical of something like this where there’s one negative post in a sea of hundreds. But that’s not where I’m coming from. It’s not specific to the case. It’s specific to the understanding, usage and application of social media that I think we have to be aware of. Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in this space really have to be conscious of this. If you did this for a client, or your CEO of an MNC and they saw this happen. What do you think are the odds you’d get budget for your next “social media experiment”? Slim to none?
Basically, I think you have to be careful how much risk you take with your brand. It’s great to hand over control to the consumers, but you gotta know your audience. Have you already been in the community cultivating “antibodies” for awhile who will come to your defence when someone steps out of line? Or are you jumping in cold? Just because you introduce a platform for one, noble purpose, doesn’t mean it will be used that way by everyone. And you have to take the good and the bad.
Back to the specific case, although the boy managed to delete his tweet and seemed quite embarrassed afterwards, I really hope he doesn’t get punished or anything because of this. It was a conscious decision to make this platform public, and therefore consequences that arise of it being public comes from that choice to be public, not the user.
After all, he just served as a reminder to us that anybody can be made aware of anyone’s social media efforts at any one time, and they’re not always going to be in sync with your organisation.
My blog has been quiet for the last week or so thanks to a trip to Hong Kong (which I enjoyed immensely), and imagine my reaction when I got home and found mutiple emails that just offended my senses. The gist usually is something like this:
Hello,
Our awesome event [insert name of event] has secured awesome speaker [insert name of speaker] to be at said event on this awesome date [insert date] together with other awesome speaker such as [name drop #1], [name drop #2] and [name drop #3]
Attached is the press release and a photograph of the awesome speaker. Please tell the world about it on your blog
Really? Dear PR person on the other end of the email, if you had such a request, would you do anything to act on it?
1) The pitch had better be relevant to me, my blog, and my readers. I’ll leave you to decipher what that means.
2) The pitch should not include a press release. A social media release or a link to graphs/videos is fine.
3) Provide a beneficial call to action. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not your news channel. If you think said awesome person is so interesting, offer me a chance to meet him or her over lunch or an invitation to the event so I can blog about how awesome I thought the person was after that.
I’m going to put it as plainly as I can: such emails are spam. And following this blog post, I will mark all emails as such and forward the email to whoever the contact person is on the company webpage (hopefully the CEO) and explain why it offends me. I’m also giving serious thought to starting a PR blacklist wiki. Sure I might miss out on some really relevant piece of news months down the line, but that is a price I’m gladly willing to pay.
Earlier in the year, in Digital Media class, Andre’s group discussed how Twitter could be used as a real-time crisis tool in campuses and/or work places, exactly in situations like a fire where you can send out one tweet and it hits all students via their cell phones. I suppose now that’s only restricted to the US.
This is not meant to be yet another Twitter-bashing post, but instead I just want to highlight how clear it is to me that Twitter never thought about the implications of including all these bells and whistles early on, and since the Twitter Fail events earlier this year, it looks like things are only getting worse, not better.
At the crux of it, things would have been better if Twitter had never introduced SMS worldwide, but slowly rolled it out if and when they were sure it was financially feasible. Once people are used to a service and you take it away, they feel shortchanged.
Personally, I’m not sure what to feel about Twitter these days. On one hand I’m beginning to feel I’ve missed it after being away for a few months, and I’m beginning to re-discover a sense of community on it.
On the other, Twitter is still by no means stable and news like this that suggests a lack of business sensibility behind them (and recent purchase and shut down of I Want Sandy) just makes me feel unsure in investing time and attention on Twitter.
I want to know if you’re still using Twitter and in what way? If you’re out of the US, has the lack of SMS-capabilities annoyed you, or is it something you can live with?
I picked up an article from Read Write Web in my feeds talking about how education is evolving, and basically that the availability of data on the internet suggests that we may not even need to memorise things for education like we used to.
To some, this might suggest that Gen Y might be getting lazy, but to me, it’s freeing up the brain to really work on other issues that can’t be as easily solved with a Google search.
One thing I never understood in my freshman year, was why I had to memorise how to create a balance sheet, when I wasn’t even an accounting student. Even if I was an accounting student, I refuse to believe that graduates leave school, get a job at an accounting firm, and sit down to create balance sheets without referring to anything because they memorised it in freshman year.
What I find more challenging, and relevant, is asking my how things apply. Or I might have all this data, but what does it mean? How do students analyse a situation from different angles and begin to think critically about issues.
Perhaps there will be some professions where memory work is still the key, but for the rest of us, probably not so.
More importantly, in response to this issue: are our educators ready to face the new wave of students who have mountains of information at their fingertips?
I think our wiki is deserving of a nomination (and a win) because it is the epitome of crowdsourcing and collaboration, the very things that inspired wikis. It’s been maintained for over a year by over 100 students, but not by their efforts alone. We’ve reached out to the prominent figures all over Asia to get their input and integrate it into a comprehensive wiki for anyone to find out more about different social media usages across Asia. I daresay it is the most comprehensive resource for anyone looking to get a quick primer on social media in Asia.
Coming here to Canada for exchange, I’ve met people from all over Asia – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, China, etc – and it’s amazing to see that our collective research really does mirror what actually goes on in their lives.
If you’ve seen or used our wiki, or even just like the idea of the wiki as a central informational tool, do give the wiki your support and drop a link to the Edublog Awards page and support the nomination!
[Disclosure: I am a contributor to the wiki as part of a course (Digital Media Across Asia) in SMU. I will also be teaching assistant for this course in January, and as such feel tremendously involved in this project and nomination!]
Tonight wrapped up my Film 240 class here at Queen’s University called “Media & Popular Culture”. One question asked was “Do you use RSS?” and the poll came to about 15% saying yes (which is not far off from the recent 11% RSS adoption rate that was researched). [No, I didn't count hands raised. The poll was done using electronic clickers so the percentages are shown instantaneously on screen.]
If these are the numbers for the more functional and popular tools, I’m expecting the figures for other avenues of web2.0 in education (wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, document collaboration) to be much lower.
So my questions tonight to you are:
1) Do you think these numbers are generally reflective, or should they be higher or lower?
2) If you don’t know about these tools, do you wish someone would teach you how to use them?
3) If you do know about these tools and discovered about them yourself, do you wish someone had introduced you to them earlier?
4) What aspects of education would you be most keen to utilise social media tools?
5) Do you even think such Web2.0 tools have a place in education?
6) If you’ve heard of tools like RSS, Twitter, Wikis, etc, what’s stopping you from using them?
I really, really wanna hear from you, so help me out. If you already know the tools, pass this post on to someone who doesn’t, and ask them to answer the questions!
On a personal note, if you’d like to collaborate with me on an SMU project similar to the one Hack College did, drop me a line!
