My trouble is just that I am too busy so far. I have alternatives that I prefer and they are numerous enough to fill my time. Similar limits kept me from understanding iPod use and making room in my days for it. Too many books to store and dust made me get a Kindle and it showed me the value of a device to store sound the way the Kindle stores print. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime these new social computing tools are of interest. I know many people have rediscovered long-disconnected friends through Facebook.
One of the things the new social computing tools allow is research. Electronic tools can provide pathways and data for research purposes that are different from all alternatives and relatively quick and inexpensive to use. The situation reminds me of my lost idea for a college major.
As an ex-elementary teacher with a math emphasis and a PhD in research methods, especially education research, I came to college teaching with a different perspective than most other professors. It was clear to me from the start that emerging tools in statistics and computing provided data and information handling possibilities that were new and therefore unknown to those whose education took place in an earlier time. Since most public school teachers and the college professors who teach them do not have a statistics background or a strong research interest, I tended to work largely alone in my department. Within days of moving to campus, I sent out a note that I would appreciate contacts and conversations with others on campus interested in statistics. Statistics is THE subject for computing since it involves manipulation of data and tons of calculation. Also, I had a more or less typical education in preparation for teaching the 5th grade. I knew that none of the coursework had to do with research methods or thinking. So, my note. That was in the summer of 1968 and it happened that the campus had just spent relatively big bucks to rent a computer. They had other computers for administrative and payroll purposes but this baby was going to be to enhance faculty research.
Campus administrators saw my note in the (printed! On paper!) campus newsletter and asked me to be the campus administrator of academic computing, a new notion at the time. Today, an assistant professor of education would not be the likely person for such a post. But at the time, there was no academic computing, no computing major and certainly no web material major. The areas that came to really use and depend on computers had not, at the time, been convinced these new fangled gadgets had any relevance to their thinking and work.
These spread-of-innovation phenomena are well understood and studied by people such as Dr. Lynn Kirby and Dr. Gyneth Slygh. It takes times for humans to cooperate and innovate and cooperate again.
Within a year or two, I proposed a college major that taught some of things teachers need to know and some of the things a data analyst/computer science major would need. The market would be a new position as assistant to the middle school or high school principals or the district administrator. The idea did not fly but the need is still there. Similarly, the new insights, habits and tools of the social computing networks, chats, texting and such are creating tools for research into the nature, tone and atmosphere of each school which are opening the need for a different sort of assistant or service, that of social analysis of the school climate. Such work has been done by institutional researchers on campuses for decades but in general, nobody has been carrying out such work for the K-12 grades.
