Personally, I do find social media tools useful for learning. Often, that learning is informal, but it can lead to formal learning. I find that the interaction is useful. Even though it is not perfect, you can still accomplish a lot of interaction with the other students that are engaged. This can be helpful if you need to discuss something, but the class meeting is still days away. The same could also be said about group projects. In another class, my group members will wait for days and days just to have a face to face meeting to decide things we could just decide in email in a day or two. There just seems to be this resistance with some people to asynchronous communication. I would agree with anyone that says there are many problems with email communication. But the trade off is that you don’t have to wait until everyone’s schedule clears to make decisions.

I say all of this even though I am not a huge fan of asynchronous communications. I would prefer to meet and work. But as problematic as asynchronous communications can be through Twitter or email or Facebook, the affordances over come those annoyances – at least for me. In a way, I guess you could say that my personal preferences for certain outcomes still drives my feelings about the usefulness of social media. I value the increased speed of communication that social media can provide. Someone else may value the affordance of the clarity that face to face interaction brings. I guess you could really twist the affordances and benefits to really meet your personal preferences depending on how you want to look at it.

Facebook groups would be more useful if Facebook didn’t have a weird habit of messing up comment order. For some reason, “pages” will just not show comments in order all of the time. Even if you choose to show “most recent”. It really makes no sense. You could always use a group instead, but then you have to set some pretty strict settings to keep the conversations private to that group. Its like groups are designed to bring in as many people as possible (which is not always conducive to learning), but Pages are designed to focus on the content posted by the page owner but not the people that Liked the page. I would make it so you could have a more private group that keeps comments straight but also allows the group/page owner to have more focused posts if needed. Which, I guess they do somewhat have with pinned posts. But even those hide the comments too much.

The biggest problem with Twitter is following which tweet is a reply to which other tweet. The website itself is making that possible, but other plugins and mobile apps that aren’t made by Twitter not so much. So I would make most interfaces for Twitter display the Tweet that you are replying to under the Reply Tweet itself. Kind of like Facebook does that for comments on older posts, but with focus on the new Tweet instead of the original Tweet. If that makes sense.