Last week I attended my first class on Social Media Fundamentals, a course offered by UBC Continuing Studies and taught by Rob and Alex from Social Signal. Opening night covered the basics of social media, and our first assignment was to write a blog post. Given I’m a sporadic blogger at best, I can safely say this class has already helped me out by prompting me to write another post, so here it is!

To help set the stage for our class on social media, Rob showed Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, a video produced by Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University.

It’s a pretty cool video, both for the content and information as well as its creativity – a great primer for providing some background context of where we’ve been and where we’ve come to in the world of digital media.

Another favourite of mine is Social Media in Plain English, by the folks at CommonCraft.

For myself it’s been an interesting ride. Having studied social psychology and education while in school, entering the realm of the web was initially about building the technical skills and background knowledge to eventually move into some line of work in usability, user experience, or interaction design – I never expected to take such a liking to the technical, business, and communication aspects of the web. Skip ahead a few years, and many lines of code, GANTT charts, spreadsheets, emails, meetings and project plans later, what’s coming full circle for me now with the rise of social media is a return to this focus on people – on the social aspects of people interacting with one another online.

The business-mind in me is both excited and overwhelmed with the possibilities of what social media is doing today and where it will take us in the future. I can guarantee you that this time last year, the thought of winning a $15 gift card for becoming the foursquare mayor of Blenz Coffee at UBC was nowhere on my radar. In fact, that whole combination of words “foursquare mayor of Blenz” would’ve been pretty meaningless. Yet here I am: after getting that one $15 gift card in the mail, I’ve returned to Blenz enough times to have renewed the card with probably at least another $30 worth of coffee.

Today I’m foodspotting because it’s just something I like to do and I get points (for what exactly I’m not sure yet).

I tweet because it gives me a voice to connect in some weird way to a bunch of people, some of whom I really don’t know at all.

I’ve re-connected with friends from elementary school, re-connected with my cousins in the Netherlands, and met (virtually) other cousins I’m about to meet in person when I go to Indonesia this summer – all through Facebook.

I’m networking with other higher education web professionals through Ning, LinkedIn and Yammer, and I’m supporting a similar network of our own community of communications professionals at UBC through a site I built using Drupal.

We’re producing videos, sharing and rebroadcasting them through YouTube and Blip.tv. As well as piloting some open source video publishing software that could run our own video distribution network.

And this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Social media has made the web something very different than what it was even just a year ago. It’s very much like stepping in a river – you can never step in the same river twice, and in this case because of how quickly things change and grow, it can be risky to step out for too long.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all this, and it’s also easy to get too carried away with everything that’s out there. Ironically, attending a class in-person is one of the ways that I’m carving out time to help me stop and think about it all. I’m hoping to share more as the course progresses – I may even start up a new series of posts with my own thoughts. Check back for some more posts with my newest tag: social media fundamentals!