Tag Archives: twitter

Using Social Media to Teach Critical Reading and Writing Skills

25 Mar

I read some articles I’d saved to Instapaper while on the treadmill at the gym this week. Frustratingly, I had no Internet access while I was there, so I was forced into a rare state of readerly isolation.

Most of my reading these days is grounded in social connections. With the exception of the (mostly guilty pleasure) fiction I read in the evenings before bed, I read online all day, almost every day. I read things that have been shared by my Twitter and Facebook communities, or I find things on my own and consider whether to share them myself.

During my forced period of lonely reading, I recognized some of the skills that I have to apply during my social reading. It seems to me that these are exactly some of the types of awareness we try to cultivate in students who are developing their skills as readers and writers. Some of these are obvious, others maybe not so much.

The first set of questions to consider is based on a standard media literacy approach, applied in the social media context when we examine content shared by our contacts:

  • Who’s the source? Who shared the link, and who actually created the content? Are they connected? If so, does their connection matter? If not, why did my contact share this content? What’s his or her motivation to share, or his or her personal interest in this content? (See also Howard Rheingold’s advice on “crap detection.”)
  • What comment did my contact attach to the content? Why? Has it altered my interpretation of the content, and if so, how? Do I agree or disagree with my contact’s commentary? If there is no commentary, is there a reason why not?
  • What is the main point of this content? (When so much information flows forth from social media, we have to be able to quickly “get the gist” of what we choose to read more closely.) What is my reaction to it?

When I choose to retweet or re-share information, I have an additional set of considerations:

  • To which audience do I distribute this content? My Twitter and Facebook communities overlap by a few members, but are really quite different. I have to consider my audience’s interests and preferred content consumption styles in making this choice. The constant challenge to “think of your audience” issued to students in writing courses takes on an immediate relevance in social networks.
  • Do I distribute this link with my own contact’s commentary attached? How would my audience respond if so? (How might they respond just to my sharing of content from the contact him- or herself?)
  • If I substitute my own commentary, I must quickly summarize my response in a few characters, or I must responsibly shorten my contact’s commentary to be able to add my own. How do I best capture his or her response and complement it with my own? How do I respectfully disagree, if necessary, to maintain a civil tone in my network?
  • If I summarize the content of what I am sharing, how do I do so accurately? How do I also write my summary in an intriguing way, inviting my network to click on it themselves? (This is akin to good headline writing, and indeed, some instructors have used tweet writing as a way to teach headline writing skills.)

In this post, I’ve tried to make explicit some of the sophisticated interpretive skills required by active participation in social networks and sharing content. For those who diminish social media as mere narcissism or distraction (yes, they’re still out there), I challenge them to see these media as another place where students can develop their critical thinking skills, in many of the same ways we ask them to attempt in traditional reading and writing. This is a new format, to be sure, but an increasingly important one, and also a format in which students can find much that interests them personally.

Free to Be You and Me (Correctly) with Social Media

25 Feb
Project 365 33/365: Things I can't survive without: Liquid Paper Dryline Grip, Pilot G-2 gel pens, and SD cards.

Whiteout: the simple solution of a bygone age.

A recent Online News Association event in New York included a panel of New York Times representatives discussing the newspaper’s use of and policies concerning Twitter, as described in this eMediaVitals report:

“One of the best things the Times has done in the past few years is have a hands-off policy toward Twitter,” he said. “People screw up every once in awhile, but that’s OK. We have to be able to push the boundaries of what we can get away with.”

Though Stelter’s noted personality still can’t creep up in a news story, on Twitter he has more freedom to blend news and personality in his tweets, particularly depending on the time of day. “More and more we program ourselves online the way that a [TV] network does,” he said.

This report caught my attention, as it seems to confirm in part some of my previous research (described here) with regard to journalism organizations’ policies toward their employees’ social media use.

In a paper I published on this topic, I suggested that organizations that trusted their employees to use their common sense and good judgment in using social media — as opposed to creating strict policies or screening social media content — would find the greatest success in maintaining journalists’ loyalty, allowing them to develop their own voices and brands online, and in empowering them to use social media successfully to represent the organization. As Liz Heron, the Times’ social media editor, stated at this panel, the paper’s lack of “draconian” policies “allowed us to blossom.”

But what about those occasional “screwups”? One social media innovation that could increase journalism organizations’ confidence in their employees’ free use of social media is the development of standardized, simple correction methods. I agree with those who argue that incorrect tweets should not simply be deleted, but the problem remains that leaving inaccurate information out there in the Twitter stream is misleading. Twitter does not currently provide a way to edit an earlier tweet (and merely editing a tweet is not a transparent practice), yet users might miss a “correction tweet” that came later in the stream.

It would be great to see an error-correction function added to Twitter, or some way of noticeably linking an erroneous tweet to an update/correction tweet. Something similar to the Post Revision Display plugin for WordPress would be a great option. If we had this sort of function, an erroneous tweet could be marked with a message: something like “You are viewing a tweet that has been corrected or updated. Please click here for more information.” (Some great posts on this issue are available from Craig Silverman here and here, and from Scott Rosenberg here.)

Empowering journalists and others to spread corrected information just as widely and easily as an initial error would build journalism organizations’ confidence in allowing journalists to reach out to audiences more freely online — while also building public confidence in Twitter as a news source.

Personal Growth and Social Networking Identities

1 Nov
Twitter me this 119/365

What are you doing, and who are you? Photo by Sasha Wolff on Flickr.

My large introductory media studies class often takes unexpected turns. With 120 students of widely varying backgrounds and interests, I am frequently surprised (and pleased) by new insights, interdisciplinary connections, and individuals’ anecdotes that challenge and enrich our class content.

During our Thursday class last week, we were discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and I described the basics of Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of social media recently printed in the New Yorker as a way of illustrating possible alternatives to Shirky’s perspective. I was curious to see if my students – who are Facebook fans (so to speak) but Twitter skeptics – tended to identify with Shirky or Gladwell.

Our discussion strayed to interpersonal relationships, rather than focusing on social movements. One of my students described a personal experience that demonstrated his own view of the types of interpersonal ties created by social media. He stated that he had an acquaintance with whom he interacted primarily on Facebook, and thought that he had a great deal of common ground with this person and would enjoy the friend’s company in person. But when they met, he found the Facebook friend to be completely incompatible as an offline friend. Their personalities clashed. He’d had no idea that their interaction would be so uncomfortable.

His experience led the class to explore a question I’d never really considered before. One of the benefits of participating in interpersonal relationships – offline, where difficult personality quirks can’t be avoided – is that we ourselves grow personally from learning to cope with other people. Though that might sound a bit self-centered, it is certainly one of the side effects of participating in relationships, for most of us: we become better able to, well, participate in relationships.

But in social networking, we all present to each other only our best faces. We rarely post things that could lead others to think poorly of us (i.e., we post “self-promotional content”). Like my student’s difficult acquaintance, we all have difficult aspects of our personalities, but we don’t make those public if we want to continue interacting with social networking tools. The witty status updates, the cautiously selected profile pictures, the tidbits of personal data that we provide to our networks are those that we hope will cause others to think well of us. Even text messaging and e-mail – with their lack of spontaneous, unedited interaction – provide fewer opportunities for our more distasteful characteristics to surface.

So what about those difficult personality quirks? What about the opportunities for growth we have in our relationships when we deal with each other and all aspects of our natures, even those uncomfortable characteristics?

For older people and those less active in social networking and other types of online communication, these questions may seem irrelevant. Many people’s online friends are still also those with whom they also interact in person during daily life. But for most of my students – who laughingly admit that they chat online and text message with people in the same room at times – these online modes of relating are the norm. I wonder if the types of interaction among all of their ideal personalities online will reduce their opportunities to learn to have effective relationships, or will alter their methods of growing from their personal relationships.

Do Social Media Users Link to Magazines?

31 May

But do they link to magazines' web sites? Photo by Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a summary of its recent study “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press.”

The study compares the variety of topics included in news-related blog posts and tweets with the range included in mainstream media coverage, and found that:

Social media and the mainstream press clearly embrace different agendas. Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda – the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied.

I don’t find these results particularly surprising, but – as a magazine person – I wanted to know how often social media users linked to magazine stories online. I checked out the tables summarizing the PEJ data [PDF] and found that they had added newspapers and magazines together in their breakdown of the sources of links provided by bloggers and Twitter users. Unfortunately, this means that the study – unless the raw data can be broken apart once they’re made available – doesn’t tell us much about whether social media users are linking to magazines’ sites in their conversations about news.

The researchers note that:

In producing PEJ’s New Media Index, the basis for this study, there are some challenges posed by the breath [sic] of potential outlets. There are literally millions of blogs and tweets produced each day. To make that prospect manageable, the study observes the “news” interests of those people utilizing social media, as classified by the tracking websites. PEJ did not make a determination as to what constitutes a news story as opposed to some other topic, but generally, areas outside the traditional notion of news such as gardening, sports or other hobbies are not in the purview of content.

So though newsmagazines’ web sites might be included in the analysis, we probably won’t see many other magazines in the dataset. That’s an understandable limitation of the study, given its specific interest. Magazines are also likely to be less represented because they don’t usually relate to breaking news, as Twitter users would most often be interested in sharing. But if magazines aren’t offering even slower-paced bloggers something to write about, perhaps publishers should be concerned.

I would guess that magazines’ web sites are also rarely linked to by social media users due to their typically poor layout and usability. But I’d like to see some data on social media users’ links to magazines – and think it would be helpful to the magazine industry to see how far they’re being left behind as web users share information and favorite stories using social media. (Or not. But I’m pessimistic.)

Social Media Policies and Journalists’ Personal Brands

11 Mar

Photo by Dean Meyers on Flickr.

I recently read Reuters’ new guidelines for their journalists’ use of social media.

Here’s a paragraph that stood out for me:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

I find it highly interesting that Reuters acknowledges their journalists’ desire to have a personal brand here. I don’t think I’ve seen an explicit reference to that emerging reality in any other media company’s social media policies/guidelines so far. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that, please.)

I recently wrote in an academic paper about the increasingly real dilemma that both journalists and their employers will face in balancing individual brands with corporate brands, particularly with regard to the use of social media to establish both. I think that as today’s young journalists come into the profession – especially those who graduate from journalism programs where personal branding and entrepreneurship are emphasized – it may be challenging to find a happy medium between using social media for self-promotion and for corporate promotion.

Can corporate policies like this one help journalists strike that balance by reminding everyone of the significance of both brands? Or does having a social media policy restrict individuals’ ability to establish their own personal brands, to the degree that they begin to resent their employers?

Overall, Reuters’ policy emphasizes the individual journalist’s role in using social media responsibly, and doesn’t set out many strict rules, suggesting instead a string of things to “think about” when using social media. It’s good to see their trust in their employees’ critical faculties, rather than some of the more draconian approaches to social media that other media organizations have employed, though Reuters does still warn that “your manager and/or senior editors will retrospectively review your professional output” and that “We reserve the right to change your beat or responsibilities if there are problems in this area. In the case of serious breaches, we may use our established disciplinary procedures.”

This question isn’t really a problem just for journalism, of course; other professions will also face the challenge of managing employees’ commitment to “take care of No. 1″ – their own personal brands – as well as their employers’, especially when long-term stable employment seems more and more a thing of the past.

Though social media policies, other than Reuters’ version, don’t yet seem to address this dilemma in quite these terms, it appears likely that this will be a more relevant issue as our workforce becomes increasingly reliant on short-term, freelance and contract projects. After all, if one’s employer isn’t going to take care of you in the long run, then you might be prepared to do it yourself, no matter what you have to tweet.

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