Millennial Media Matters

This week I would like to take the opportunity to talk about the article, “5 social media skills millennials lack” by author, Ryan Holmes. I selected this article because I knew whatever skills millennials might lack, my baby-boomer brain would be lacking those same skills and several heaps more. Although this article is written from a business point of view, I can certainly see many between Holmes’ business concerns and those I experience as a 21^st century educator. I was not disappointed.

Holmes begins his article acknowledging the Millennials’ expertise in all things social media. While they are “the generation brought up on Facebook,” many of whom have never known “a world without the internet,” they are often lacking the knowledge of how to adapt these skills into the workplace.. The problem seems to come down to perception (for us all). We see social media as a way of doing “A” when it has the potential of being capable of doing “A” while also doing “B, C, D, E…and Z”. It seems that we are so focused on what social media does, we are missing what social media has the potential to do for us.

Holmes lists as primary areas of deficit for the millennials as follows:

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Knowing when to hit the bleep button

The author gives credit for knowing what to publish, but he sees a shortcoming when it comes to knowing what NOT to publish. As in the business world, both students and educators must understand just how far our posts and tweets travel and understand that once out there, we have little to know control over to whom they travel.

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Using social media to actually save time

Both in the business world and the education, social media is perceived as a potential time drain, new uses for social media (like digital meetings and Tweet Chats) have the potential to save a great deal of time. It will just take time to learn how to save time…

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Understanding how to crunch the numbers

Holmes feels that we are limited by our understanding of how social media can be a potential data analysis tool. This also is true in the classroom. The data analysis methods with which we consider the efficiency of social media have the potential to be far more sophisticated than our current practice. We have the ability to move far beyond likes and views, we need but to try.

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Mastering the multi-network shuffle

In short, the millennials (and we) don’t really have an understanding of how all of our social media tools could potentially interact to create even greater results. It is like we have to shift out thinking from linear ( I will use this platform to achieve this task) to three dimensions(I will use a variety of platforms to achieve this task and many others).

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Networking professionally on social mediaIt’s hard. When I show movies in class that should be enjoyable, students are often reluctant to enjoy them because of the setting and the purpose for viewing. In a same way, people are reluctant to rethink social media as an educational/ professional tool because it has the potential to sully the “fun”.

Closing Thoughts:
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the fact that this article was written for Forbes magazine does not lessen its importance as a piece on education. The issues raised in the article are issues that both we, as professionals, will face along side our students. Our best hope is to continue to continue to learn from one another as professionals and keep tapping into our students as potential teachers to help us understand the possible power that social media can have in our academic and professional lives. - Darren 

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