This infographic does a fair job in covering the ‘life’ of Generation Y, and tries to label ‘them’ as the best generation ever. Do you agree with it?

Click to view the whole of the Generation Y: The best generation ever (?) infographic.

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Earlier this week I gave the following presentation to a groups of first year Accounting and Finance students:

• Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”)

and was kindly asked by Pauline Randall of Florizel Media to write up a reflective account of the presentation and what kind of impact it had on the students. You can read my full account on Pauline’s website:

• Florizel Media – Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network

I hope Pauline doesn’t mind but here is a snippet for you to read, but please read the full reflection using the link above.

“What I was not prepared for, when I thought about presenting this, was the students were completely unaware that their activity online could have any bearing on their employability. It was clear from the gasps and shocked faces when I introduced the examples of people losing their jobs because of their online activity that I had hit my mark; I was changing their perception of not only social media and social networks, but also of how they are going to use them.”

I also had the event recorded by the Bournemouth University installation of the Echo360 lecture capture system. Here it is;

Click to view recording of the "Social Media and Social Network" Presentation

It was only after I’d finished that I’d remembered I hadn’t said the “Farmville / I Quit” story turned out to be a hoax, but I’ll remember next time!

Links and YouTube videos played in the lecture are:

• Did You Know 4.0 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
• United Breaks Guitars (song 1) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
• CBS News Interview – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ophSWaRSQ
• “Woman publicly outs boss for playing Farmville at Work”  – http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-job-farmville-boss/
• The Fully Sick Rapper – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqGLHluDoe0

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I’ve been lucky enough so far this term to be involved with two sets of students, both under-graduate first years (one unit called ‘Professional Studies’ even), and with both sets I have been surprised and slightly worried about the level of understanding they have about their use of Social Media, and how the little things can make a difference.

What surprised me, from a couple of informal questions to a few vocal and enthusiastic Facebook users, is that they have never considered what is viewable online, their ‘digital foot print’.

So, I asked around about what we do for the students to alert them to the risks, and how this could potentially affect their future employment prospects. I had some good answers but the one that made me groan was simply “why don’t you talk to them about it?” Me and my big mouth!

Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”).
View more presentations from David Hopkins.

Update, 17 November 2010: I’ve been researching the United Airlines ‘breaks guitars’ example I use in the presentation above and have found some interesting figures. Not only has the original YouTube video been viewed/accessed over 9.5 million times since it was loaded last year, but it is reportedly the cause of a 10% drop in share price for United airlines, costing shareholders a whopping $180 million!

I took the class list (190+ students) and randomly searched for 10 students. I found 6 of them in Facebook easily and the other 4 had names that matched to 300+ other Facebook users, so I didn’t search for them. I used my personal Facebook account, which is not connected to my work or work colleagues in any way. This is important as I wanted to be sure there was no way I could have access through a friend of mine or theirs … this is the kind of set-up a future employer would have when searching.

What I found reaffirmed my belief that they don’t understand what they do, or how the privacy settings worked. I can say that all users had photos they’d uploaded that depicted some very good nights out, drunken behaviour, in one case smoking possibly dubious material, lots of holiday and beach pictures, and also photos they’d been tagged in by friends, so content they had had nothing to do with, but it appeared on their profile!

Naturally when I present this I can’t show them the exact photos or say who I searched (I do not have the list of names saved anywhere!) but I hope this will at least raise the awareness of their online activity and, if nothing else, these students think about their use of Social Media, their privacy settings, as well as the kind of people they befriend online.

It is also very difficult to talk about Social Media or Social Networks without concentrating on Facebook; it seems that’s all they’re interested in, and the majority of news stories I researched all concentrated on it too.

Have you got, or had, a Social Media (horror) story or have you taken a similar approach with your students? Please leave all comments below.

Related posts:

1. Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network #SoMe
2. Presentation: ROI of Social Media
3. Policies for Staff use of Social Media and Social Networks

Educational short video from Creative Commons (CC) explaining what the CC license is all about. This video provides a great summary of CC, and why it’s relevant for both educators and students.

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This video is billed as

“From cell phone and video games to Facebook and YouTube, digital media are changing the way young people play and socialize in the 21st century. In this video, education experts say digital technologies could transform the way kids learn and participate in their communities.”

The 21st Century Learner

What I like about it is it’s simplicity, with extracts like;

“Probably the most important thing for kids growing up today is the love of embracing change.”

“They want to be measured because they want to see how much they are improving. In fact the most common mantra of a real gamer is ‘if I ain’t learning, it ain’t fun!’.”

“We find, when we talk about 21st century skills, people often reduce them to ‘skills for the work place’ and ‘skills involving technology’, and we really are thinking of skills for creativity, specific engagement, social life; the full range of experiences that young people will be involved in in the future.”

Related posts:

1. 4Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking and Creativity
2. Learning Tools: for the Learner
3. Video: Social Media (in 2009)

I am seeing and reading so many blog posts and tweets with someone trying to explain what is a Social Network, or what is a PLN/PLE.

Which is why I couldn’t resist showing you these Educational Social Media Diagrams from the HubSpot Blog;

This first one highlights, for those slightly confused about what exactly is Web 2.0, that we’re no longer in a broadcast medium where the big corporations tell us what is going on but rather that each of us is capable of finding out from our network (be they people or tools like Twitter or Facebook) about the world around us.

“Social Media Participation Chart” by Oversocialized

This next one is another really good and simple way of showing the uninitiated  about, in my mind, how Generation Y or the Millennials think about the digital world they inhabit. If, like me, you are not from the Gen-Y era (but either want to be or work with them) then this could help you understand their world – this is especially important for those of us who work in education, as this is what they want and expect from us, so we have to deliver on it .. yes?

Digital Mindsets by David Armano

Again, this is another very good and graphic way to produce the same information – in-roads and barriers to the network and information, nicely laid out like a city plan.

Welcome to Social Town by E Factor Media

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In my recent series of posts on QR Codes, I’ve dealt with how and why they are used, and what you need in order to join in. But what about when they don’t work .. or rather, when they don’t give the results you’re after?

I came across this blog post on the LinkMe Mobile blog; “FAIL: Accessing Barcode-Based Advertising Using a Mobile Phone“. It deals with the use of QR Codes in marketing, but the findings are equally important when dealing with these codes in a learning context.

“What’s the Return on Investment (ROI)? For an advertisement to be successful with the consumer, the end result had better be worth the effort! Unfortunately, both the Intel and Warner Bros campaigns missed the mark.  Intel’s ad ran in Wired Magazine, delivering up a YouTube video from the recent CES Las Vegas that showed how Intel technology could be used in the future … yawn.  Warner Bros did a bit better by delivering up some movie trailers via barcodes on pizza boxes during Super Bowl season.

“Today’s mobile consumer is savvy and sophisticated. If they’re going to engage with a new technology, they deserve a response that is tailored to them and pertinent to their needs.

“Japanese mobile campaigns regularly deliver up worthy promotional items to consumers — including valuable coupons & discounts, instant buying opportunities and often the opportunity to win even more prizes. In the U.S., after asking the consumer to engage, both the Intel and Warner Bros campaigns returned ho-hum responses of limited or no value — a negative ROI. Result: The campaigns failed.“

What the two campaigns had done (Warner Bros. and Intel) had just provided a link to an existing resource (web page, video, etc) that could be found by other means.

The rest of the article is the sales-talk about what LinkMe can do for you, but I’m interested in doing it for myself. Please feel free to read it yourself if you want.

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Another inspiration and informative talk from TED, this time from Clay Shirky on ‘how social media can make history’.

“While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.”

Related posts:

1. Video: Social Media (in 2009)
2. Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network #SoMe
3. Presentation: Social Media & how (students) can survive online

I found this list of 25 TED talk videos worth watching. I’ve already referred several times to the inspirational talk by Sir Ken Robinson on Educational Transformation, and I’m slowly wading my way through the rest of them. I cam across this one by Richard Baraniuk this evening … I liked it, I hope you do too.

“Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.”

Richard “has a giant vision: to create a free global online education system that puts the power of creation and collaboration in the hands of teachers worldwide. He’s realizing that vision with Connexions, a website that allows teachers to quickly “create, rip, mix and burn” coursework — without fear of copyright violations. Think of it as Napster for education.”

Related posts:

1. Video: Digital Learners
2. 3D movies in your learning
3. Distance Learning / Distance Education

“Since most of today’s students can appropriately be labeled as “Digital Learners”, why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices? This presentation was created in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching.”

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