Social media
workshop –
the big picture
Kathy Phelan and Roger Dunbar

Getting online in Australia
50%
of online Australians
80%
of online Australians
access the Internet use social networking
via a mobile device sites (comScore, 2011)
(Nielsen, 2011)
www.smallworldsocial.com 2

Education leadership use
Principals and school leaders technology usage on a daily basis - 99%
email, 88% internet and 58% smart phone (Principals Australia Inc., 2011)
Social media tools that are integrated into classroom teaching (Mitchell,
2011)
• YouTube - 53% of teachers
• Email - 50%
• Wikipedia - 31%
• Moodle - 17%
• Bookmarking sites - 8%
• Twitter, Skype & Facebook - 3%
In this study specialist science teachers made up 50% of the total
respondents, with the remainder being generalist teachers, specialists in
other areas, administrators and academics.
www.smallworldsocial.com 3

Global trends
Technology Infrastructure Content Privacy & Security
Mobile devices Cloud computing Digital curation Data = $$$
www.smallworldsocial.com 4

Tablets
The uptake of tablets is rising at a rapid rate.
The desktop computer will be a thing of the past in 4 years.
www.smallworldsocial.com 5

Cloud
Cloud computing is
driving this growth, 60%
of server workloads will
be virtualised by 2014.
www.smallworldsocial.com 6

Digital curation
Digital curation is being driven by people’s need for self expression and
personalisation.
Hottest examples:
Tumblr – visual blog platform. The fastest growing social media platform
globally, surpassing 10 billion posts and 29 million blogs to date.
Pinterest – content curation platform. Daily users have grown 145% since the
beginning of 2012 with 12 million visitors a month.
Delicious – social bookmarking.
www.smallworldsocial.com 7

Privacy and data security
People share where they are, what they are doing and what they
are going to do. This data is valuable, traded in the market as a
commodity.
95% of students in years 7 to 10 use social networking sites
(Monash University, 2011).
www.smallworldsocial.com 8

Video: Tumblr meet-up at Federation Square 2011
www.smallworldsocial.com 9

Video: Social media technologies changing the world - University 2.0,
Sebastian Thrun at the DLD Conference in Munich (Jan 2012)
www.smallworldsocial.com 10

But just how useful and hard is it
going to be for me?
Video: Rob Gell - the weather man that predicts a change in the forecast
www.smallworldsocial.com 11

What does the future hold?
Interactive TV - put yourself in the narrative
Multiple screens
The rise of the ecosystem and seamless transitions from one ecosystem to another
Consolidation – one-stop shops

Q&A
www.smallworldsocial.com 25

Designing
Organizing
Learning
Roger Dunbar
Stern School of Business
New York University

The Process
• Designers divide a task into component parts
• Designers then develop an integration process to link the parts to achieve
a desired outcome
• If an outcome requires predictable action, use rules, routines, standards,
heuristics
• If an outcome requires flexibility, use interaction, meetings, discussions,
liaisons
• The design issue: how to support appropriate predictability and flexibility
in a process
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 2

Learning in Organizations
• At one level, organizations are process tools
• At another level, organizational arenas are where people can act out just
about anything
• Managers often assess things with criteria different from those designed
into processes
• How can one deal with multiple assessment criteria?
• Ideal answer: Focus on original design criteria
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 3

Managers
• Managers act based on their experience
and education and their interpretations
are based on the categories and structures
they know
• Managerial interpretations are usually
short-term, dealing with current issues
• As interpretations are out-of-line with task
performance, performance will be hurt
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 4

Learning in Organizations
• Hierarchical organizations want top-down transparency so that those
at the top feel they are in control
•
• In seeking “their way” top managers work hard and alienate those
further down
• Role-holders may support performance goals e.g., education
performance, but they are keenly aware of hierarchical power, what it
•
is pushing for, and their alienation from it
•
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 5

Illustration
• New York has around 1600 schools and 1.2 million students
• In 2002, Joel Klein, a high-level Department of Justice lawyer
(Microsoft),was hired by Mayor Bloomberg to direct reform efforts
Joel hired more lawyers into his top team
• How do you expect a group of lawyers to organize to run a school
system?
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 6

• Lawyers
• • Lawyers use the law to define constraints
• Within these constraints, they rationalize how to exploit the situation
to benefit their client and how to defend their client from negative
• reactions in the environment
• • Categorize the school environment
• Principals, teachers, students, parents
• Which group is causing the problems?
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 7

A culture based on metrics
• The US uses standard tests in subject areas to assess and compare
student performance
• The US calculates national average scores and state and school
scores in each subject area
• Teachers are assessed based on what their classes achieve relative to
national averages
• Lawyers and their allies want to give teachers financial bonuses as
their students’ scores are better on standard tests
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 8

Targeted school principals
• Centralized everything
• Principals were unionized, “bad”.
• Sought to get rid of “bad” principals
• To replace them, a NYC Leadership Academy opened to train new
principals or retrain old principals
• Lots of team-building skills, education process knowledge, flexible
integration skills, etc.
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 9

Results
• Massive disruption
• Teachers are unionized - new principals arrive as “chosen ones”
• Administration proposed to pay teachers extra (financial incentives) if
student scores improve. Teacher ratings are published
• Parents are often cut out of the process
• Little change in school scores
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 10

The Process
• Designers divide a task into component parts
• Designers then develop an integration process to link the parts
to achieve a desired outcome
• If an outcome requires predictable action, use rules, routines,
standards, heuristics
• If an outcome requires flexibility, use interaction, meetings,
discussions, liaisons
• The design issue: how to support appropriate predictability
and flexibility in a process
www.smallworldsocial.com.au 11