Serena Carpenter of Arizona State told the 2010 AEJMC conference how she taught social media, and the first number was the interesting one: six to eight hours of direct teaching, with the rest woven through the other parts of the course. The focus was blogging, Twitter and reputation management.
Her starting problem was that students treated every service like Facebook, which made the norms and practices of each platform something that had to be taught rather than assumed. The exercises were concrete — build a Facebook album cover in Photoshop, find a story and a source through social media, build a Twitter list, run a Twitpic contest — and CoveritLive was used to open up discussion when a guest speaker came in. Before any of that, students had to name their goals for using social media and then work out which platforms and services actually served those goals.
One assignment was to search for themselves. Carpenter found that students took up social media far more readily once they saw their own name appear high in Google results, and the course ended with a reflection paper on their own participation. By that point, she said, students were talking about having to participate online or not existing at all. Her own next step was to run the course itself through a Facebook page, posting due dates and handouts there.