As we know, higher education is slow to change. Faculty and administrator resistance is enabled by the extensive matrix of institutional paperwork, procedures, hierarchies, and traditions. Those familiar with both business and higher education know that most colleges and universities lack critical application of technology and social media. Think about how much more effective higher education could be if faculty, administration, departments, curriculum, and outreach used social media and social business to achieve their objectives.
The thing is, our digital culture won’t wait for higher education to discuss, rationalize, and slowly implement technology into their services. Social media has already partnered with our students who use it all day, every day. Yes, this includes during our class time (I know my students are surfing Facebook, LinkedIn, Klout, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumbler, Hootsuite, etc). But now, how can I redesign my instructional methods to harness the power of social media to achieve my teaching objectives? How can faculty and administrators use social media to increase student success and organizational change? Furthermore, how can administration use social media to increase faculty and staff effectiveness, streamline employment practices, and increase job placement for our graduates? In the near future, I will discuss these important questions through a blog series called Presentfull starting on Monday, June 18th, 2012. This new company is helping to revolutionize higher education and more readily streamline a P16 environment. Administrators, faculty, and staff will use this new social media application to find it directly contributes to institutional mission achievement.
Stay tuned, we live in an exciting time and I can’t wait until I can share it with you.
Tara Madden-Dent, Ph.D. 
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Addressing this social media in higher education is a tough one. This is because most of the students who are currently in college at the moment, does not remember the world without laptops, cell phones, or social networking cites. The social media is part of their culture and they have grown up along side of facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other social media cites. The best way to integrate and re-design instructional methods to harness the power of social media to achieve your teaching objectives is to use the technology such as laptops during your lesson. Not necessarily every class period but use laptops once every two weeks or once every week. Even though students are not expected to own a laptop your classroom can be located in a computer lab on some days to use the social media in your favor. By having a computer lab as a classroom you can allow access to certain cites and allow the students to interact with the lesson plan that you are teaching using google docs to simply share their thoughts. A more modern way that students can share their thoughts and opinions is twitter, students will be able to create a twitter account if they don’t have one already and you can simply ask them to hashtag “#” their tweets to a certain hashtag, for example “#EDU210UNR” and all of their tweets will be in one location.
We’ll said Caden. In the past, I’ve had students create a Twitter account and follow educational leaders and legislative initiatives. I started #EDU210 which other classes and students also use. It’s pretty fun and I find it an effective way students learn. Thanks for sharing your comment.