Why should UT students care about social technologies? I got suckered into volunteered to get involved in UTweet, this post stems from our first discussion about the organization and our goals for it.
Archana and I met this weekend at Austin Java to talk about UTweet and the state of social technologies at the University of Texas. I think that in general, students at UT are fairly clued into technology and social networking - you can’t walk around without seeing people on laptops, using cell phones, or listening to MP3 players. You’ll see people on Myspace or Facebook with totally blinged out profiles (which is cool with me, if that’s what trips your trigger - just don’t slap me with a large trout or whatever). Both of those sites are, in my opinion, fantastic for maintaining person-to-person connections, but are not very good for facilitating dialogues in an easy way or enhancing true communications with one another.
I believe that we (UTweet) can help show the UT community the strength of new and emerging social technologies as tools for helping us do the stuff we do every day more effectively. Social and general web technologies and services can help us connect with each other, as individuals, teammates, peers, organizations, and the community as a whole.
We polled community members and alumni via Twitter on why students should care about social technologies like Twitter, here are some of the responses:
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hayesdavis @davidgiesberg i agree. i get value from twitter in the form of real-world connections. facebook, et al aren’t meeting their potential. |
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conniereece @davidgiesberg Students should care because these are now business tools and they need to learn how businesses use them. (my short answer  |
I think Hayes and Connie hit it on the head - this stuff has moved from being a way to connect to people you already know and maintain those connections to a way for us to conduct business and make more worthwhile connections with people that we might not otherwise have a chance to. Twitter is a fantastic example of a tool with a low barrier to entry for staying connected with people on a day-to-day basis and connect with people in a way that we could not before.
The way I see it, we can help show UT how to use these cool technologies and make the UT community just a little bit tighter and a little bit better connected.
Hook ‘em Horns!
Picture courtesy of flickr user mr3wan.
Comments 3
I completely agree - the more we know about these things the better off we’ll be, and we need to know about these things because companies need to know about these things because we know about these things, if that makes ANY sense at all. I’m a bit wary of putting personal information up not because I’m scared of stalkers (I’m not, at all), but because I’m scared of BUSINESSES reading it. What if there’s something on my Facebook that is going to come back to haunt me? What if there’s a piece of me out there, forever cached on the Internet, that will one day turn my life around? It’s a tough balance - you have to always be marketing yourself, and sometimes it’s easier to just avoid apps and networking and whatever else altogether.
Posted 14 Jul 2008 at 8:58 am ¶I’ve always seen college students as a resource, as they have more spare time than most and still have a sense of empowerment that many people lose as they get older. If you use UTweet as a mobilizing tool for opinion and action, you will certainly be doing the community a service.
Twitter can be useful, but it can also be a huge time suck.
Posted 15 Jul 2008 at 11:39 pm ¶I would love to see more students using Twitter! I was actually surprised at how few know about it.
Last semester, during a discussion of communication technologies in organizations, I asked my students how many of them had heard of or used Twitter. Out of almost 60 undergrads (mostly Communication students), none of them had (but all but two of them had Facebook accounts). It seems like something they would really enjoy and benefit from, so I think UTweet is in a great position to get the word out there. As an instructor, I can think of dozens of ways I can use this in my classroom.
So keep up the good work and let me know what I can do to help!
Posted 16 Jul 2008 at 9:36 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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