Simon,
I left a comment – hope they approve it!
Good company you’re keeping now.

Being an old-fogey (my daughter’s words muttered under her breath – see below) of just 47 summers and an IT geezer for 20+ of those, I am just a teeny weeny bit massively biased lol

While I think these tools and their offspring are here to stay in this web-enabled world, there are real security issues (not just data protection, but also the bad guys are out there too trawling for ways to do real mischief).

The best (possibly urban myth) story I heard was some Relationship Manager who mistakenly uploaded all their private client details and email addresses onto a SM site. (Not my employer, I hasten to add.) Ouch!! Can you imagine the Risk and Compliance love-in from that one…

However, the old move over for the young in time and hence I see big changes a-coming in how we do business in the developed world of MNCs and their very existence. SM tools and media are perhaps the trojan horse we old corp foot soldiers are pulling through the corp gates…?

Finally, back to the daughter’s old-fogey characterizations – she’s still 12, mind you!

I wandered in the other night to see how homework is going and this is what I found:
- homework books open (good)
- IPod playing some mp3 “music” (I think)
- FaceBook Open
- YouTube video playing in 2nd window
- Skype chat open
- IM open and chats a whirring.

A short, sharp conversation later and we’d agreed this compromise:

- “Difficult” topics requiring concentration (e.g. new Algebra stuff) will have music off and computer screen on standby. Silence!

- “Cruising topics” such as writing out Japanese Kanji drills or cutting up paper for art etc – background “stuff” is OK.

All this is self-policed for now so I will have to see how it goes.

One good thing – homework is being discussed in real time via chat. As far as I can see it’s not “cribbing” (cheating) other people’s answers. One chatter will mention an answer they got to a maths problem and the group will then chime in with comments if people don’t agree or don’t understand. This is healthy IMO – ‘course needs a grounding in comprehension and self-study too.

I don’t think the Corps (corpse?! lol) of 2018 know what’s going to hit them…

Regards
Mark McClure
Tokyo

@Mark – Firstly let me congratulate you on being the first to write a comment longer than the post itself
The collaborative potential os Social Media is massive. I doubt any companies – even those that ban them – think this isn’t the case. I think that this revolution needs the social infrastructure to catch up, i.e. policies. A cautious organization could open it’s doors to these tools if they have well established policies and a workforce that abides by them