Researcher of Media Lab, Tarmo Toikkanen co-authored Finland’s first book on social media in the educational sector. The book is published by Finn Lectura publishing. Social media has attracted lots of interest in the field of business, with numerous publications on the subject in English and in Finnish. In the field of education, however, this book (written in Finnish) seems to be the first one of its kind.
While the authors themselves first questioned the wisdom of writing about social media in a traditional media publication, there is a definite need for this book. While some teachers are already active in the web 2.0 space, the majority are still struggling to master the 1.0 tools, namely email, learning environments, and web pages. For them learning about the myriad aspects of social media cannot happen using those myriad social media tools. Rather, they need a more familiar method of information transfer, a book, which allows them to learn of this new field comfortably and in a structured manner.
The book contains descriptions of over 70 social media services and tools, and covers major areas of social media participation, including syndication and feeds, information filtering, publication and blogs, collaboration platforms and wikis, social networks and communities, multimedia, various communication methods, virtual worlds, and ways in which to bring all these various tools together into a coherent learning environment.
The book is designed to be both a tutorial into the various aspects of social media, as well as a reference book for continued use. Whenever the reader might need to know about video services, or hears of Jaiku or Vimeo, they can check the book for further information.
While Tarmo did the actual writing process of “Sosiaalinen media opetuksessa” as a hobby project, he drew on the considerable experience and expertise he gained during the years he has worked as a researcher in the Learning Environments research group of the Media Lab. The reflective working culture of the group has been instrumental in facilitating learning about and keeping up to speed with the field of social media.
More information about the book (in Finnish) is at http://www.sosiaalinenmediaopetuksessa.fi