I have been listening in to several conversations of late that have been pondering our collective fate in light of new social media affordances. It's not just politics or education or celebrity news that's driving this train. It seems the potential to organize, act, and solve problems has never been greater given new social media applications. And given the relative trajectory of social media adoption across the globe, things appear to be potentially getting brighter.

Since we have the ability to organize in a ridiculously easy fashion (Paquet, 2002), the next step involves developing new forms of group leadership. Managing people, activity, and information is no small feat; thus, while new social tools are re-vising the way we do our work, new organizational models are required that, for the most part, have yet to be invented. I look forward to reading the research that examines how to best manage and leverage new media applications for social action in profit and non-profit arenas. However, with the pace of new application development and deployment being what it is, it seems difficult in many cases to stay on top of rigorously assessing these new media applications, hence functional research is often years off.

A different solution might be turning social media research over to the users themselves. This is precisely how the notion of action research evolved. Imagine having school children studying the effects/affects, and impacts of social media in mathematics, biology, economics, in literature, as well as the communities within which they participate. Imagine K-12 school children using social media to study social media and the world they live in. Of course, teaching children how to set up, validate, and evaluate experiments with rigor and aplomb requires teachers to be capable of doing such, as well. So the reality there points back to the caliber and quality of educational professionals and what we are doing as a country to ensure that we are providing our youth the best education possible (and not simply what they can afford). As such, it is my belief that school curricula need to be re-written to allow learners and educators to become researchers of, as well as producers of knowledge and information, and not just consumers thereof.

So, if this is something you believe in, you might ask yourself: What am I going to do to alter this reality?

What are your expectations? How are you going to make these changes happen? Who do you need to better educate? What's is your timeline? What resources will you need?

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear John Henry's hammer ring.... Just don't swing yourself too hard and I look forward to reading your results.