In November I did my first session teaching social media and using social media.
We had two 2hr slots with the Liverpool Archive students. Our first session was to introduce them to EAD and the EAD editor. Our second slot was an Introduction to Social Media and Archives.
The EAD session can be quite a complicated session for them to get their heads round but they all mastered it pretty quickly. We finished off Session 1 by showing them how to create a Twitter account. The idea being (and these ideas are adapted from Jane Bozarth’s book ‘Social media for Trainers‘) that we’d get them set up and following myself, @bethanar, @archiveshub and @UkNatArchives and to have had a quick search for #archives. They then had a few more suggestions of who to follow and then they had a week to post one thing they had learned about twitter or from twitter since they had joined. They also had to mark the post #hublucas.
Well that was the idea. Best laid plans of mice and women etc. Wills and Kate announced their engagement. Twitter crashed. And then it crashed a little bit more. Luckily I’d produced step by step instructions on how to create an account and told them exactly how to use hash tags and provided suggestions of who to follow. So I asked them to create their accounts in their own time. I also said that we would go over their findings in the next lesson and that I would of course be looking for what they’d written using #hublucas.
I really wasn’t sure whether anyone would do it. I was really pleasantly surprised that the majority of students did their ‘homework’ . Some of them only just before the lesson. But they did it. One ‘wag’ when asked by a friend what #hublucas was, commented ‘just a way of forcing us to join twitter’.
(Having also run workshops on social media for peers and colleagues, I have learned that resistance is ALWAYS part of social media training. Some people just don’t want to engage with it. It might be that they are frightened by technology. They might not want to let go of the control that they have with their own website or library/archives management system. It might clash with their learning style. They might be introverts and not want to put their personal ‘self’ out there. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t know it’s out there. It also doesn’t mean that they won’t come to see the benefit of an institutional use of social media. It just means it might take a bit longer for them to accept it or they might only ever have an organisational twitter account. )
When we rejoined the next week I did a presentation about what Web 2.0 and Social media was. I then asked Beth (@bethanar) to explain how social media has helped with networking and professional development or as I dubbed it for the session ‘Marketing yourself’ (Much to Beth’s distress.) I then told them how I use and have used social media to market the Archives Hub, Copac, the LILAC conference and our launch of the new Mimas brand.
I then got the group to discuss twitter after having experienced it for themselves and then seeing how we used it. During the week the students had posted a lot of the negative comments. They couldn’t see the benefits and some of them just thought it was trivial. However once we’d explained the benefits as we saw them for our services they were a lot more convinced but Twitter and could see why an archive might want to have an account.
It occurred to me that I could offset the negative comments by doing this the other way round and have subsequently tried this with the Aberystwyth archives students. Funnily I’m not sure it really matters and part of me, likes the instilling of learning that happens when you change someone’s mind in the way we did at Liverpool.
After twitter, I got the students to look at Facebook fan pages and Blogs and then in pairs talk about what they thought of the pages and blogs they were reading. I got them to think about the voice which was being used in each case, what was different about each one, Did they like it? In the case of the Fan pages, I also asked them “Would you want to work in this institution?”
The students seemed to get a lot out of the sessions and so did I. I was gratified to see them really examining the pages and blogs that they had been introduced to and felt they were really starting to think about social media in terms of the ‘business case’ or as a marketing tool for their archive.
Pretty pleased all in all and not bad for a first effort. (Well I didn’t think so)
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