“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.”
Birmingham City University is proving its faith in the renowned saying by offering a Master’s degree in Social Media.
The British university’s one-year program will offer courses will teach students how to set up blogs, publish podcast and build up their social network using Facebook, Twitter and Bebo to develop their communication and marketing skills in hopes of increasing their chances of getting hired in the future.
The man who assembled the Master’s program, Jon Hickman, said that he had received significant interest from prospective students of the course after he had described its content and will begin offering the $6,200 program in the upcoming school year.
Despite the promising feedback, Hickman has received countless emails querying about the course’s content and others deriding his new and innovative program. “We’ve had one email saying I should be ashamed” Hickman wrote on his Twitter page.
Professor Tim Wall, head of the university’s School of Media defended the program to the Associated Press, saying that “Social media, built around new technologies, are some of the most profound changes happening to the media at the moment. We are looking forward to sharing the research we are doing in the school with media professionals through the MA course.”
According to Birmingham City University’s web site, the School of Media is hoping students will take advantage of the “opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research and practice.”
The page is set up as a FAQ layout and provides informative answers to pressing questions of the program.
But some students continue to feel that the program is a waste of time and resources, arguing that course’s content is so basic that most can pick the skills up on their own, instead of wasting 48-weeks and a heavy chunk of change on a MA in social media.
Still, studying social networking is hardly a new trend. In 2007, Hung Truong, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of New Mexico began studying the rise of Facebook and other social networking sites.
How did the site function while being free for its audience? Why did people become so concerned with fixing false Wikipedia definitions? He enrolled in a social computing graduate program at the University of Michigan to find out. Truong and the University of Michigan initiated the trend that may soon now trickle down to elementary schools.
The Guardian has reported that primary schools in the United Kingdom could be adding web skills and spell check to the curriculum, as technology is becoming an essential in research and education.
Now after years of teachers being annoyed that their students are on Facebook, they have made adjustments to incorporate the social networking sites into the classroom.