What are Social Media and the 2.0 phenomena? If it is here to stay, how do we deal with it?
January 3, 2008 is the Nova Scotia Community College: Tourism Management “Industry/Faculty” professional development day. In May of 2007 we invited industry participants to join faculty in gaining insight to a tourism management business simulation. As a follow up to this event we decided that efforts would be made to search for further joint professional development opportunities.
This topic presented itself for selection. As faculty we had noticed over the past few years the arrival of the ubiquitous cell phone usage by our students and in more recent times in class text messaging and the computers logged on to Facebook or MySpace. The more we spoke of it, the more we also started to hear about the phenomenon in the media and from our students. When we discussed the topic in industry they seemed to express the same concerns and interest in finding our more about Web 2.0.
After researching this topic there is little doubt that social media is here to stay. This will be a dynamic process with some of its players coming briefly to the forefront and then vanishing as quickly. This does not change the underlying value proposition that this interactive communal activity brings to society and specifically for our purposes to the travel industry. Equally there is no question that it calls for a paradigm shift in how we think and that it will have significant unintended consequences.
As a tourism educator, who is a digital immigrant, I am excited by the possibilities of web 2.0 and aware of the risks and challenges inherent in learning new tools. However we must be also aware of the responsibility of educating students to be discriminating users of the 2.0 world and that quick (wiki) has its benefits and drawbacks.
Please add your comments on this blog and on today’s session .
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3 comments:
As educators we need to catch up with our students and communicate with them on various levels (both in and out of the classroom - real and virtual).
First let me thankk all of you for your participation during our session, it was exciting to see your response as the day progressed. Please do suggest some further PD opportunites for our group for the future
I have to admit it was almost like trying to learn another language in a few short hours.
Thank you for the "taste" I think if we want to understand we need to be willing to do what all the "millenials" do- basically make relationships important enough to find new ways to maintain and grow them.
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