I was inspired by Alec Hosterman’s post about using Egypt’s Social Movement through Social Media. Since I lost a week with my students due to the snow, I came up with an idea for a class activity. I am breaking my class into four groups:
- Blogs
- Online Journalism
I am asking each group to explore each social medium to discuss how Egypt’s social movement made an impact on each one. I am confident Twitter will win, but I want the students to explore and pull out specific examples that show why their social medium was effective or not effective. I believe it’s important that we read theory, but when an important event happens, we, as educators, must stop and help students explore this phenomenon. These events as Alec says are teachable moments. I liked his idea of showing if social media drove the social medium and I will be sharing the article by Malcolm Gladwell that suggests social media really has no impact. I hope to show my students that yes, social media impacted this social movement and made it move much faster than what Gladwell suggests in his article. Yes, people had social movements before without technology, but technology really helps spread the word. One tweet created chaos when Lance Armstrong tweeted he was going to take a bike ride and hundreds if not thousands arrived where he was on their bikes. Maybe not a social movement, but word spread fast.
I expect to take tomorrow and Thursday to explore this topic. We’ll use the assigned readings as a backdrop for conversation, but otherwise they will see that Egypt’s social movement will lead them to understand the importance of convergence, collective intelligence and why we’re studying computer-mediated communications. I love teachable moments. Thanks Alec for the great blog post and great suggestion on using this moment in history.
