Do I really need another social network? Or, another way, do I really need to fine-tune my experience across a number of websites? In one model, we use one website as a one-stop-shop to care for our social “needs” online. For many, if not most, this is Facebook. When Google+ rolled out and included ”Circles,” many (including myself) praised this feature that lets us control who sees what. In essence acknowledging that all of the social contacts that we have don’t necessarily deserve to be lumped together.
Several years ago, forums were all the rage. In many ways, they still are, though not nearly as talked-about as they were. The beauty of forums were their ability to provide a unique place to discuss a very niche topic. For example,
priuschat.com is entirely devoted to, surprisingly enough, the Toyota Prius. Social networks like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook seemed to take some of the ideas of the forum and throw it into a blender where you could then have these types of conversations with your friends and anyone else you wanted to let into your social graph. With Google+’s “Circles” it seems to be swinging back the other way. Recently, Toyota announced its own social network for car owners. Are we going back to the granularity provided by forums?
Education seems to be in the throes of a similar argument. We have 30 different students in a classroom. That is to say we have our students lumped into one large list/circle/group. We share information to all of them, even if it isn’t relevant to them or they don’t care. Some of what we say they’ll “like” and maybe even have a comment to add. But by and large, it seems as though it’s just noise to many of them.
What if education were more like a forum? What if there were community managers and moderators, topics were discussed as they came up, and (as Google+ recently added) topics and conversations were searchable; available on-demand? We (adults) spend a lot of time worrying about the content and not nearly enough time concerned about the medium. What would happen if we took cues about content delivery from the ways that our students receive more and more of their social content? What about video? What about real-time communication? What about being open to criticism?
Granularity could (or maybe should) be synonymous with differentiation.
