Lesson 4b - email is ancient history; Why try Google Groups

Many people say email already has joined fax in the Museum of Media. Some people use only Facebook, some others only Twitter for communication. (I'm tempted to join the latter.)

Although I'm rather fine with playing with the idea of burying email I would not consider killing the email lists - they are priceless for some purposes.

E-mail lists are the earliest form of electronic social media - established in early 1980's, 30 years before the term Social Media became widely known. (Check this one-page article for Mailing list history)

If you need to organise well structured, user friendly discussions about a specific topic nothing still beats mailing lists; Facebook is too noisy and chaotic and on Twitter you don't have space for well grounded arguments.

And the good news is that today you can follow email lists like the Google Groups without receiving or reading emails - everything can be found on one web page!
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I asked the students of this course to use Google Groups for team building, but it looked like they rather would have used Facebook for the task. Below a copy of my attempt to convince them of the benefits of using Google Groups. Let's see what happens!
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Cai Melakoski

If you organise teams here it gets too messy - we can't soon find anything.
Give Google Groups a try - you might learn something.
Those allergic to email can stop the emails and use only the web site for organising themselves in teams and discussing the team topics.
I've wrote on the blog a lesson showing how you can skip the emails.

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  Cai Melakoski One central learning strategy of this course is "learning by doing". And while community building is one of the two topics of this course we practise that on different platforms. So we try Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, email-list (Google Group), Wiki-documents to find out what platforms are most suitable for what.

  
  
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  Cai Melakoski The "learning outcomes" part of the description of this course says:
  "The student knows how to use social networking, blog publishing, microblogging services to broadcast and to communicate with targeted audiences. (S)he is also able to establish and moderate on-line discussion groups and wikis for knowledge and community building."

  
  
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  Cai Melakoski Thus one of the tasks of this course is moderating a discussion group. The first chance is to moderate a discussion about a team for Team Project 1.
  Other chanses will come, stay tuned.
  Satu Aholin (Film Festivals) and Sebastjan Brezovec (B.E.S.T) have already started the mission. Please join them on our Google Group or start building your own team!
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