Great show on North Carolina Public Radio's The State of Things today about social media in the workplace featuring friend-of-HASTAC Fred Stutzman! Below is an excerpt and a player to hear the audio of the show.

Social media and blogs are important elements of journalism. They narrow the distance between journalists and the public. They encourage lively, immediate and spirited discussion. They can be vital news-gathering and news-delivery tools. As a journalist you should uphold the same professional and ethical standards of fairness, accuracy, truthfulness, transparency and independence when using social media as you do on air and on all digital news platforms. 

Of the half dozen comic strips in last Sunday's paper mentioning cell phones, the Internet, or a social networking site, they all relied on the common trope that these technologies are overly complicated, packed with needless features, and too hard to learn.

On January 6, I was invited to give a short talk at Fayetteville State University on using social media in the classroom as part of our annual mid-year conference.  My talk focused on the use of blogs, Twitter, and wikis.  To illustrate some of the core strengths of these tools, I outlined my talk in a blog post, which I am re-posting here.

This is just a quick note to share with the community that I'm co-teaching a seminar on social media with Prof. Rita Raley this quarter.

What was different about HASTAC from other Digital Humanities organizations in 2002 is we were about the first organization to embrace Web 2.0 and social media as learning platforms.  We immediately grasped the idea that technology as an affordance would always be limited, but thinking and working together, even across boundaries and especially across boundaries, would allow us to blow old and stale and partial paradigms out of the water.    . . . 

About 5000 unique visitors each week come read and write and think along with us now at HASTAC so something is happening here, and we know the HASTAC Scholars are among the leaders in a new way of rethinking what we do and how we can think and learn together.