Category Archives: Research

Social Media Policies & The Workplace

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One of the recurrent questions or issues that surfaces in conversations about social media and the workplace be it in a school, corporation, or governmental organization is whether or not social media undermines productivity. Here is a post from one of the researchers at the Social Media Collective (part of Microsoft Research New England) who shares a report on the consequences of banning these sorts of technologies.

… we’re starting to understand the very premise – that social media usage inhibits productivity – is a myth. A forthcoming, two-year longitudinal study titled Exploring social network interactions in enterprise systems: the role of virtual co-presence by Nandhakumar, Baptista, and Subramaniam, of Warwick Business School, found that using social media at work could actually enhance workers’ productivity.

What’s your take on this? What kind of social media policies do you have in place at your school or workplace? Did that policy incorporate existing research on social media usage?

Image courtesy Creative Commons license and Flickr user Dennis Matheson

EdTech on the Periphery?

Beyond the required reading for this course, some of you may be interested in checking out more detailed discussions. Allan Collins and Richard Halverson have an excellent book called Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. Here’s a thoughtful point they make in Chapter 1-

“… schools have kept new digital technologies on the periphery of their core academic practices. Schools often provide computer labs, tech prep courses, and computer literacy and programming courses to help students learn about technology, but do not try to rethink basic practices of teaching and learning”

What are your thoughts on this? Does any of this resonate with you? Do you find that tech sometimes lives on the periphery? To what degree do you see your colleagues or peers re-thinking their approach to teaching and learning in light of these technologies?