What Social Media and Ike Turner Have In Common

Here me out.

I believe that education and how we learn as a society has reached an awesomely creative apex due to the use and implementation of social media in course and curriculum design as well as in just overall communication between individuals. People who never had access to learning before, now have an abundance of useful and useless information at their fingertips.

Now that I’ve spread a little positivity and sunshine your way, I’d like to throw something a little radical out there: If i were to cast social media and education in a movie, social media would be Ike Turner and Tina Turner would be played by, you guessed it, education. There’s a lot of love there between the two but their relationship is often complicated and sometimes completely jacked up.   Let me explain.

Ashton Kutcher would have you believe that the whole world has jumped on the social media band wagon. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this.

My mom has now become a twitter snob (“You didn’t know that you could #Follow Friday your twitter lists Jasmin?”) and has started using “defriending” in normal everyday conversation (“I am going to be a little late meeting you for lunch. I went in to defriend one person and ended up defriending others”). Seriously, she said that to me last week.

With regards to learning in an educational setting, you have some institutions, teachers and training professionals that are vocal members of “Team Social Media”. They embrace the flexible, unpredictable nature of informal learning and really get off on the instantaneous often Tourette’s like communication that takes place between instructors and learners.

On the other hand, you have “Team I hate change and innovation. It scares me. I mask that fear with my disdain for anything that starts with the word “social”. Not sure how they would fit all of that on a t-shirt.

In my professional life, I often work with corporate trainers that share with me in confidence that they think social media is the devil. Ok, they don’t actually call it the devil but they sincerely believe that it’s ruining the traditional classroom structure that has existed for so many years with the instructor or trainer positioned as the bearer of all information,  the owner of intellectual power essentially.

I think at the core of this love/hate relationship lies a real fear of being replaced,of not being needed. As we continually shift to a culture that looks to technology rather than teachers for answers, many in the education world wonder what place, if any, they will have.

In the case of Ike & Tina Turner, Ike felt that he held all of the power in their relationship but it really was Tina that held them together through that tumultuous relationship. Ike needed Tina. Social media needs education. Social media needs all of those teachers, trainers and institutions who champion learning to come on board to really do some amazing things in education for people.