Correction for you - it's not Uni of Birmingham (which is far too old-school to run such a course this century), but its younger neighbour, Birmingham City University.
Firas Steitiyeh
· 8 months ago
WOWW!! should be highly considered!!
Stuart Flatt
· 8 months ago
Interesting idea, but with such a wide a varied way of doing things they will possibly be huge conflicts between teachers and students? And how do you decide who to ask as guest speakers and lecturers, what defines someone currently as being an expert in their field with social networking?
Also that price for a single year is crazy, and seems a bandwagon idea? Most 3 year honours courses come in at less than that.
Maybe a better way would make it optional modules on Marketing and PR type courses?
twitter.com/stuartflatt
Paul Bradshaw
· 8 months ago
"Conflicts" implies that we're going to tell them what to do. We're not. It's a conversation. As for guest speakers, we'll approach that in the same way every conference does: who's saying or doing interesting things and has experience to share? Price for a single year is normal for a Masters course in the UK - this is not an undergraduate 3 year honours course. And as for optional modules - the whole point is we're not crow-bar-ing this into a traditional 'marketing' course that teaches people to do the exact opposite of most social media norms (e.g. most marketing courses would have you filter and control); this is a wider issue.
Stuart Flatt
· 8 months ago
If your not going to tell them what to do (i.e. learn) and if it is a conversation how is their a set curriculum? Social media / networking may be flexible, but you still need boundaries, guidelines and processes. If the lecturer cannot take control of a class then it is more wild facilitation that actually teaching.
Surely if the modules are optional, that is not 'crow-barring'? People would sign up if them deemed them appropriate.
I think your being a bit defensive here, I know there has been alot of media backlash, but I was merely trying to convey my thoughts.
Oh and just because someone is not on 'facebook' does not mean they are not real! Equally just because a profile is on facebook does not make that person true to real life.
Is there information available on the course? Maybe you could post a link to allow people to make up their own minds rather than a listen to a 'virtual' person...
@Louis - Good point on validity and how up-to-date the curriculum is.
Anyway for a social networking course, it sure has created a buzz in 'social networking circles' so job done :)
Paul Bradshaw
· 8 months ago
Sorry, didn't mean to come across as defensive, I think this is really interesting. If I have anything to do with it (and I will) the curriculum will be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the social media landscape - so broader themes rather than specific technologies. Those are the boundaries. The guidelines are the assessment criteria, and the processes are lectures, workshops and independent study.
As for the dubious quote, I know how some journalists work, and it also seems odd to me that a student who says 'everyone knows how to do this stuff' is not doing it himself. Especially with very few students not on Facebook.
Course link (would be good in the article itself too) is http://bit.ly/masocialmedia - you'll notice it's also aggregating anything tagged #masocialmedia
Maneesh Prabhalayam
· 8 months ago
cool...seems a new career is emerging in social networking.
CE2949BB
· 8 months ago
As serious as a degree in Creation Science.
Chris Chesher
· 8 months ago
A number of University courses around deal with social media (but few focus on them exclusively). Our Masters in Digital Communication and Culture in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney deals with social media, but places them in social, historical and theoretical context. In an area that changes so quickly it's crucial to be grounded.
LouisVenter
· 8 months ago
My major concern would be the currency of the curriculum, Twitter has really exploded this year and obviously would demand a lot of time IMHO but whos to say its going to be as influential next year?
As a grounding the course is probably fine but to attach a Masters title to it seems a bit of a reach to me.
Also while best practise is constantly being defined how on earth do you plan a curriculum? It could be that by the end of the year students are being graded on outdated practise?
Ecommerce Job.. Where are you?
· 8 months ago
Totally agree. Today you couldn't choose social networking sites to feature for a class starting in 6 months or a year. There's no telling they'd be the same. Jennifer's right too, class would have to change monthly, if not weekly to keep up with site changes. By the time anyone graduated, knowing specifics of one site could be completely outdated.
What could be done is use it more as a theory class. The basic concept of social networking sites being used to have online conversations hasn't changed since pre-web internet days. The more difficult part is leveraging it to a commercial advantage. Social networking sites are fundamentally just communication tools, like a telephone. Joining the conversation as opposed to forced interruption marketing is a concept that does need to be learned.
LoloBloggs
· 8 months ago
Just a point but the University of Birmingham is (very) different to Birmingham City University which is offering this course. The University of Birmingham is an old red brick institution (like Harvard, Yale and Columbia) that definitely would eat a shoe before offering this type of course!
Signed,
University of Birmingham alumni....not that I'm elitist or anything!
davidsim
· 8 months ago
People who don't have a year to spend on the subject, but need to get up to speed in their workplace, might want to try a somewhat shorter (2 day) course! http://4tm-services.com/practitioners-courses/
Stan_Schroeder
· 8 months ago
Thanks, fixed.
paulbradshaw
· 8 months ago
Still says "students" though - the reports only mention one.
paulbradshaw
· 8 months ago
And of course it's an MA in Social Media, not social networking...
Mark Essel
· 8 months ago
Probably the first of many university programs related to social media and it's powerful effect on design and networking.
Tim Entwisle
· 8 months ago
But don't forget the older professionals. They need someone to teach them. A lot of my peers are alienated by the whole social networking/marketing world.
Aleksandre
· 8 months ago
Hmm... good idea for masters... though it is new thing it deserves its place in university curriculum imho
Omer Rosenbaum
· 8 months ago
Actually there is another institute in England that offers a similar program. The London South Bank University has a B.A. program called Social Technology. It is strange that what every kid can learn from a week of social activity over the internet requires a year for a grown up to learn.
Ben Parr
· 8 months ago
I could not believe the title when I saw it come up in my feed reader.
Times are changing.
Renee3
· 8 months ago
Amazing. Something all marketing execs should consider providing to their marketing department.
Ashish
· 8 months ago
Really a gr8 news for "online-social" animals like us :)
Rachel Burkot
· 8 months ago
This is a good idea, and I certainly don't doubt its potential popularity. The fact is that social media is becoming huge, so why not offer possibilities with it? And perhaps the best way to get people to take it seriously is to offer the chance for people to legitimately make it their life's work. Now, if social media is your passion, you can have a solid means of enacting and encompassing that passion in your work.
Lelia Katherine Thomas
· 8 months ago
Well, I guess universities better do something to keep up with the times, considering their teaching methods and resources are almost always ancient. I am sure this is one of those courses that quite often the students should probably be teaching the professors, and not vice-versa.
J
· 8 months ago
A few points here more about comments than the article.
First the idea that the class has to have a top-down control structure is entirely at odds with how social media works. It's a conversation, not a lecture or a speech. It's to the university's credit that they're approaching the class much in the same fashion. Yes, the professor should direct the conversation toward covering the elements of the program, the various platforms, utilities, the intersection of social media and the law and alternate media, but more in the role of facilitator than as know-all expert.
Of course, I believe that's true for a lot of classes. Regurgitation of the teacher's bullet points isn't learning; get the students thinking about this stuff in class, aloud and in their independent work, and you've done more to teach them about how to think about the material than simply to adhere to specific technologies and viewpoints that quickly become outdated.
Secondly, I recall that even though we studied Shakespeare in my literature classes, there were new books being written and published every day. OMG! How could we learn this outdated stuff? Weren't those professors wasting our time?
I don't think the idea of this degree program is to teach you how to use Twitter 2009 and the first version of TweetDeck. It's to teach you how to determine who is worth following on Twitter, how to separate the personal from the professional in its use (and how to mix the personal into your professional so that you don't present yourself as a marketing-speak spewer), how to beta test various additional apps in your use of these platforms to find the best mix for you, how to teach other people the use of these media, and so on and so forth.
For all you naysayers and skeptics, this sounds remarkably like kind of complaining when universities started offering courses in television or advertising. Even in this brave new social media world, apparently the new is always ripe for attacks.
Kenley Neufeld
· 8 months ago
I'll be teaching a Social Networking and Social Media course in Fall 2009 at Santa Barbara City College. California residents will pay about $75 for this online course.
Nicole Murray
· 8 months ago
Are there any advanced degree courses in Social media that are worth looking in to?
vruz
· 8 months ago
one year ?
are you guys insane ?
Eric Vogel
· 8 months ago
It's definitely a good thing, but social media changes so quickly I think the course won't be relevant enough information and could be to broad and known by most addicted social media people already.
theusername
· 8 months ago
Valid. At least they are offering it before every other U bandwagons in a year, of which will all be extinct in two... by then "SocMe" will be retinal attention marketing and semantic media (well, that may be a stretch). anyways... what with numbers like these: http://bit.ly/5chJo
theusername
· 8 months ago
Valid. At least they are offering it before every other U bandwagons in a year, of which will all be extinct in two... by then "SocMe" will be retinal attention marketing and semantic media (well, that may be a stretch). anyways... what with numbers like these: http://bit.ly/5chJo
@theusername
· 8 months ago
Valid. At least they are offering it before every other U bandwagons in a year, of which will all be extinct in two... by then "SocMe" will be retinal attention marketing and semantic media (well, that may be a stretch). anyways... what with numbers like these: http://bit.ly/5chJo
Chris
· 8 months ago
Great..now we are going to have thousands of 15 year olds, with Masters Degree. In 3 years, every 18 year old will have a Masters Degree, right out of high school. This is so dumb at many levels.
Stephanie DeLuca
· 8 months ago
I think this would be a popular class if offered in all universities. I wonder what the professors will be teaching besides the basics. Will they talk about the behind the scenes of a social media site? That will be interesting to find out.
E E
· 8 months ago
Wow fantastic - I have been looking for the right course to complement to my first degree in Golf Course Management. As I am not earning any interest at the moment it's also a great way to use up my savings
Steve Edwards
· 8 months ago
Temerlin Advertising Institute in Dallas offers a grad program with courses such as Social Media Marketing, Commercialization of Virtual Space, Metrics, and Interactive advertising!!
In one year facebook and twitter will be obsolete... social world changes much faster than that... ;)
Baron Barry
· 8 months ago
What happens when Facebook and twitter are no longer the next big things? And its something else? I do hope its general social media principles.
Vinay
· 8 months ago
University of British Columbia offers degree in Analytics.. does anyone even know about it? And degre in Social Media.. give me a break. you can learn them in 3 days by visiting Blogs, Diggs & Sphinn. They could have introdcued that as a part time or summer time learning course.. not a full time..! Hmmm
There are many colleges which offer the same under Masters in Digital Marketing. So nothing really new here. Cheers
Hanson Hosein
· 8 months ago
Good to see universities taking this seriously, though I agree with some comments here that (1) you shouldn't get too caught up in the platforms of the moment; and (2) you need to "walk the walk" when it comes to guiding a conversation and changing the traditional top-down university classroom environment.
We take that seriously in our own digital media master's degree program at the University of Washington in Seattle (http://mcdm.washington.edu). We take a strongly collaborative approach to learning, both in-class and through online collaborative platforms. In my own "Social Production and Digital Distribution" class, we emphasize the need to understand the motivation and trends behind social production (Cluetrain Manifesto, The Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation). We then apply the conceptual to the creation of hands-on strategies for various community organizations.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. may come and go. But what remains is the very real change in communication with the ongoing creation of online communities (which, as Clay Shirky says, share, cooperate and take collection action all beyond traditional institutional intermediaries). That won't go away unless the Internet self-destructs.
Robin Houghton
· 8 months ago
The question is whether there is any academic value in this course. It's not a new idea to study something as current and possibly fleeting as social media. I did an MA in Digital Media at Sussex University in 1999-2000, and I remember people laughing at the fact that I was studying 'the internet'. A lot of what we debated then and the tools we used would be outdated now, but the course was grounded in media theory. We spent as much time getting to grips with Adorno, Gramsci and Bourdieu as we did with hypertext, digital tools and the future of the internet. It was a scholarly approach which still informs my thinking now, as an online marketing professional, but I did it primarily out of academic interest. My dissertation was a study of online community, obscure at the time, and well before social networking took off of course.
If anyone asked me now about doing a course in social media in order to get a job in this field, I'd point them to the IDM or one of the many bodies offering 'social media for business' training, tell them to follow people like Chris Brogan on Twitter or attend the Social Media Influence conferences in London. My feeling is that university is exclusively for academic study and an MA should be about engaging with and extending research & understanding in the areas that social media touches such as social psychology, cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy and even history.
James
· 8 months ago
Excellent post!! Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life. Check me out!!
to really make this work - it should mirror the social media structure and everyone teach each other
Nicole DeRuiter
· 8 months ago
Annenberg school of Communications at Univ of Southern California has offered the Annenberg Program on Online Communities for some time now; I'm part of what will be the third graduating class. We're lucky to have great minds in lots of areas of internet/community research, soon to include Henry Jenkins who will be joining USC this summer! :) Had to toot our horn a little bit.
Stephen James
· 8 months ago
Education on social media? It's called a blog.
Ellen Ross
· 8 months ago
And this degree program is NOT offered online? Seriously?
cantubury
· 8 months ago
Maybe American Ford Motors and GM (government) formerly General Motors could send some executives to learn how to sell American cars. of course 12 month is a long time.....at city u of birmingham...those Brits are creative...
JJMacey
· 8 months ago
Well,
At this point consider me a Ludite. Look it up! Its a Brit term.
C'mon I live in PHX, AZ. You can get a degree in everything @ ASU. As long as the school is making $.
froggertv
· 8 months ago
Spending 6000 usd on learning social media is i think waste of money and time as i don't see any job prospects for the graduates coming out of the university after completing their degree in social media. One can easily learn about every aspects of social media on the web itself.
Josh
· 6 months ago
WHat a joke hahaha
seo birmingham
· 5 months ago
Like people are going to be impressed with a social networking degree!!
VP
· 4 months ago
I find it a little ironic that using social media tools is free, and here they are charging you to "prove" your skills... Practice makes perfect, so why pay for a class in something you've already mastered?
All Comments
Also that price for a single year is crazy, and seems a bandwagon idea? Most 3 year honours courses come in at less than that.
Maybe a better way would make it optional modules on Marketing and PR type courses?
twitter.com/stuartflatt
Price for a single year is normal for a Masters course in the UK - this is not an undergraduate 3 year honours course.
And as for optional modules - the whole point is we're not crow-bar-ing this into a traditional 'marketing' course that teaches people to do the exact opposite of most social media norms (e.g. most marketing courses would have you filter and control); this is a wider issue.
Surely if the modules are optional, that is not 'crow-barring'? People would sign up if them deemed them appropriate.
I think your being a bit defensive here, I know there has been alot of media backlash, but I was merely trying to convey my thoughts.
Oh and just because someone is not on 'facebook' does not mean they are not real! Equally just because a profile is on facebook does not make that person true to real life.
Is there information available on the course? Maybe you could post a link to allow people to make up their own minds rather than a listen to a 'virtual' person...
@Louis - Good point on validity and how up-to-date the curriculum is.
Anyway for a social networking course, it sure has created a buzz in 'social networking circles' so job done :)
As for the dubious quote, I know how some journalists work, and it also seems odd to me that a student who says 'everyone knows how to do this stuff' is not doing it himself. Especially with very few students not on Facebook.
Course link (would be good in the article itself too) is http://bit.ly/masocialmedia - you'll notice it's also aggregating anything tagged #masocialmedia
As a grounding the course is probably fine but to attach a Masters title to it seems a bit of a reach to me.
Also while best practise is constantly being defined how on earth do you plan a curriculum? It could be that by the end of the year students are being graded on outdated practise?
What could be done is use it more as a theory class. The basic concept of social networking sites being used to have online conversations hasn't changed since pre-web internet days. The more difficult part is leveraging it to a commercial advantage. Social networking sites are fundamentally just communication tools, like a telephone. Joining the conversation as opposed to forced interruption marketing is a concept that does need to be learned.
Signed,
University of Birmingham alumni....not that I'm elitist or anything!
It is strange that what every kid can learn from a week of social activity over the internet requires a year for a grown up to learn.
Times are changing.
First the idea that the class has to have a top-down control structure is entirely at odds with how social media works. It's a conversation, not a lecture or a speech. It's to the university's credit that they're approaching the class much in the same fashion. Yes, the professor should direct the conversation toward covering the elements of the program, the various platforms, utilities, the intersection of social media and the law and alternate media, but more in the role of facilitator than as know-all expert.
Of course, I believe that's true for a lot of classes. Regurgitation of the teacher's bullet points isn't learning; get the students thinking about this stuff in class, aloud and in their independent work, and you've done more to teach them about how to think about the material than simply to adhere to specific technologies and viewpoints that quickly become outdated.
Secondly, I recall that even though we studied Shakespeare in my literature classes, there were new books being written and published every day. OMG! How could we learn this outdated stuff? Weren't those professors wasting our time?
I don't think the idea of this degree program is to teach you how to use Twitter 2009 and the first version of TweetDeck. It's to teach you how to determine who is worth following on Twitter, how to separate the personal from the professional in its use (and how to mix the personal into your professional so that you don't present yourself as a marketing-speak spewer), how to beta test various additional apps in your use of these platforms to find the best mix for you, how to teach other people the use of these media, and so on and so forth.
For all you naysayers and skeptics, this sounds remarkably like kind of complaining when universities started offering courses in television or advertising. Even in this brave new social media world, apparently the new is always ripe for attacks.
are you guys insane ?
http://smu.edu/meadows/advertising/graduate/wor...
There are many colleges which offer the same under Masters in Digital Marketing. So nothing really new here. Cheers
We take that seriously in our own digital media master's degree program at the University of Washington in Seattle (http://mcdm.washington.edu). We take a strongly collaborative approach to learning, both in-class and through online collaborative platforms. In my own "Social Production and Digital Distribution" class, we emphasize the need to understand the motivation and trends behind social production (Cluetrain Manifesto, The Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation). We then apply the conceptual to the creation of hands-on strategies for various community organizations.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. may come and go. But what remains is the very real change in communication with the ongoing creation of online communities (which, as Clay Shirky says, share, cooperate and take collection action all beyond traditional institutional intermediaries). That won't go away unless the Internet self-destructs.
If anyone asked me now about doing a course in social media in order to get a job in this field, I'd point them to the IDM or one of the many bodies offering 'social media for business' training, tell them to follow people like Chris Brogan on Twitter or attend the Social Media Influence conferences in London. My feeling is that university is exclusively for academic study and an MA should be about engaging with and extending research & understanding in the areas that social media touches such as social psychology, cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy and even history.
http://twitter.com/spryka
Hall Monitor
http://detentionslip.org
At this point consider me a Ludite. Look it up! Its a Brit term.
C'mon I live in PHX, AZ. You can get a degree in everything @ ASU. As long as the school is making $.