Still not required?

I appreciated the Goodyear, Casey, & Kirk (2014) article "Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice" because, one, that is basically my produsage project (phew!) and, two, I think that higher education and student affairs has been doing this in a lot of ways, and was interested to see what the study on teachers would reveal.  

Professional higher education and student affairs associations (I'll use ACPA because I'm a bit more familiar and have been a part of the organization's decision-making conversations) have been adapting to using more Web 2.0 engagement components to build community for a little bit of time now.  Present on all mediums, engaging in the creation of an online mentoring connection program, were starters, but really focusing on what Goodyear, Casey, & Kirk (2014) discussed in terms of the "financial and time implications" that impact teachers from being able to work together, is also found at the collegiate administrator level (p. 1).  Enter video-recorded convention speakers, teams dedicated to blogging and posting/managing the Twitter fall, live-streaming of educational events, video information posted on a regular basis (http://videos.myacpa.org/home) and, most recently, a hybrid model of one day conference with Skype sessions and satellite conversations this September- http://www.myacpa.org/events/2015-presidential-symposium-fulfilling-our-promises-students-fostering-and-demonstrating.   Kind of cool services that a membership to the Association make available without the hassles of leaving the office, traveling, and the cost of attending; and while that has ramifications for the Association's bottom line, lets focus on how more people are getting the opportunity to learn and participate in a very digital way. Cool.

Tied to that are also folks in the field and their social media personalities - communicating on a variety of the spaces that we have indicated throughout the class. All good stuff, keeping the conversation going, engaging people with others who do the same work they do, helping knowledge and learning happen outside of their institution (or, for the article's sake, classroom or school).

I was totally on board with the article, until towards the end, "It was ineffective as a means of support for the two non-users.  Consequently, as a community we need to ensure we empower and facilitate practitioners to develop their practice without alienating those who don't want to engage with social media" (p. 14-15).  I immediately scrolled up to the top of the article, convinced that such a statement must have been written a decade ago.  To my chagrin, just last year it was published.

And, so now, I'm at a place of struggle.  I have been the person that didn't want to engage in social media and Web 2.0 tools.  I'm still not in love with video conferences and RSS blogs and I think Wikis are kind of ugly and not how I want to spend my time online.  But I realize that the nature of my work, and the nature of the world in which we live in, requires online presence, knowledge, participation, and engagement.  And yet I know that not everyone is there yet.

So, I wonder, when will technology tools that create opportunity for learning and engagement stop being apologized for and simply become part of the fabrication of the work that happens every day?

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Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A., & Kirk, D. (2014). Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice. Sport, Education and Society, 1-17.