Saturday, October 20, 2007

Students' Awareness of Social Media Tools

Barry Hollander was asked how valueable the knowledge of social media tools is to the students he teaches and if those students are using that knowledge to their advantage when entering the workforce.

Hollander replied that while almost all of his students can make thier cell phones sing and dance, there are very few that know about a lot of the new technology. The students in Grady have sophisticated skills related to their majors, like InDesign, but when using Web 2.0 technologies they are not nearly as aware of the tools available.

Johnathon McGinty also commented that many of the young interns he has worked with all have Facebook accounts and MySpace pages, but hardly any of them knew what a blog was, or if they did, they did not have a good idea of how blogs worked. Knowledge of blogs has become a screening tool for him.

It is interesting to note that there are so many social media tools that are easy to use, fun and offer a huge amount of connectivity, and yet many students or young people resort to just Facebook and MySpace. The young generation is supposed to be all about experimenting, trying new things and being the first ones to share in the new trends. Why the lack of interest in new social media tools by this group of young adults as a whole?

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