[Edublogger Ewan McIntosh(l) chats with Canadian investor Rick Segal on streets of Edinburgh. Photo by Shel]
Scotland's Ewan McIntosh is a research practitioner for Scotland’s national education agency, Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS). As such he has played a major role in the remarkable adaptation of social media into Scotland's public schools. He has also become prominent in the international blogging community and is speaks globally on the subject of social media in education.
Here are his responses to the SAP Global Survey:
1. Both your expertise and passion are social media in education. Can you tell me a bit about how the two are being used together in Scotland and how that will impact Scotland overall?
Scotland has been a bit different from other countries in terms of adoption of social media, because most of the impetus has come through the education system first. Just one example: the project I have been working with since September 2006 has grown from 20 or so teachers sharing their ideas, experiences in the classroom and resources through blogs, to somewhere around 350 by this summer, with around 800 bloggers in the education area alone. Throughout Scotland educators are realizing what is to be gained from having a wider pool of expertise on which to draw, and social media is the glue binding them together.
The impact on education of children is profound, even if the children themselves are still getting limited use of social media, especially when they hit secondary school (yes, there are more kids in Primary schools doing exciting things with social media than those aged 11+). As teachers refine their practice quicker and with better expertise to choose from, in the form of reflections and ideas and action research, the education of our children improves in tandem.
The impact for our nation in years to come will be significant for this very reason.
2. How do you expect social media in Scotland to impact Scottish business?
Scottish business has been slow off the mark but is now picking up more speed as people like me and my colleagues at the Edinburgh Coffee Morning shout louder about it. There are, unfortunately, a lot of ad agencies and individuals who aren't really using social media themselves on a daily basis, who mislead companies and organizations as to what this might bring them. That is, they're busy promising short term gains when the reality is something more like two years for any tangibles to kick in. I'm starting some work with Scottish Enterprise, the public/private body which helps small to medium enterprises in their business. Hopefully I'll start to mentor a particularly Scottish kind of business later this year to see what social media might do for it.
3. Let's expand to the EU. How are the social media changing culture in the EU? Is it closing or expanding cultural differences?
My expertise in other countries varies, depending on the country. It's such a diorama of culture to start with before you take social media in to the mix. My wife is French but managed to miss the wave of social media. Our French friends, on the other hand, wouldn't refer to it as 'blogging' or 'social media'. They're just having too much fun sharing their pics and family news through MSN and Skyblogs, not caring what they call it.
Slovenia is one to watch, since the education minister put in huge broadband pipes to most towns and cities for the schools. It's only a matter of time before they leapfrog other, more 'established' nations that have plugged away at social media adoption for some years. Ireland, for example, has a terrible state of affairs at the moment regarding broadband. The Fisheries minister there has more to do with internet access than any other - they needed it for the relay points for fishing reports, as far as I know.
4. What happens to business and culture when the young people of the EU enter the workplace and take over the market? How will social media then be used for such functions as marketing, recruiting and customer support?
2007 is the year when our sixteen year olds, all over Europe, start to enter further education, university or the workplace. They were born in the same age as the Web. Unfortunately, I don't think education or business is doing enough yet to equip them with the skills they need to function professionally with what, for them, are their online toys in countries over Europe. In pockets around Scotland, you might start to see some more appreciation of the skills youngsters have, and an effort to harness these through further training or simply talking to them. In the European market, however, I think there are too many nations working with old hierarchical business and governmental ideals for this to make any impact for at least the next generation. I'm just hoping some of these young upstarts begin to make what we see as innovative management and social media use much more common before the next generation come through.
5. Which tools do you see ascending and which do you see in decline?
The blog continues to be a place which people value for constructive reflection, for self-promotion or the promotino of their ideas. Presence tools (Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku et al) are for a different, more fun purpose, and some are using them in clever ways in tandem with their more thoughtful blog profile.
In decline? Television. I know everyone's saying that TV and IPTV are the big things this year but they've obviously never met a teen. Teens don't watch the telly. They want much more interactivity than that offers. You can put the telly on the web, but it's what's around a program rather than the program itself that is going up. TV itself, in education, in business, in pleasure, is heading down.
6. When I visited Scotland, we had some interesting talks about virtual reality in education. What prospects do you see for it in business moving forward?
Simulations, working out best and worst case scenarios, doing things you can't do in physical space due to lack of funds, space, imagination...
Business can finally do some really short-term exciting projects at low cost instead of pumping money into grandiose F2F projects.
I think that gaming and games, as distinct from virtual reality per se, offer the best opportunities for sims and improvement of employee skills - the employee, after all, remains the most important asset of a business.
There are some great examples of medics, with problems in numeracy, using Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training on the DS Lite, to help prepare for passing their exams. We use it in primary schools, too, to great effect and relatively large attainment gains.
It doesn't even matter if the game content is not related to the sector. The complex skills required to get through a game, whether it's Sim City or World of Warcraft, are the kind of skills a consultant cannot teach.
7. Can social media help bypass traditional language barriers? If so, how?
As long as Americans continue to call a bum bag a fanny pack I think we're going to have language barriers, even when we're speaking the same tongue
;-) I've found the visual elements of social media have helped me connect to people who speak languages I do not, and connect better to friends I know F2F from all over the world. Seeing a video, having a photographic tour of a home on Flickr, it all helps bind us better. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words. And that was before 'they' saw YouTube.
