You fight with your employees: In some businesses, management and employees are constantly at odds. (An example was given of a unionized workforce where management-labor strife was common). This is also not the type of company that should encourage employees to communicate directly with customers via social media. Management skepticism: If management doesn't believe in social media, then employees who have been told for years that public communication needs to be filtered will be hesitant to try out a new medium which requires them to speak openly. In this scenario, management needs to encourage and reward participation to make social media work. If they don't, it will fail. Strategic Vacuum: Don't do social media just to do social media. If a company doesn't know what they're trying to accomplish, then there will be nothing to measure and no way to determine success. Just as with any other initiative a company takes on, there needs to be an objective...and that objective shouldn't be to distribute a press release.

only 2% of businesses are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Only 2% - can you believe that?

Student interest in taking an online class is on the rise, the survey found. Among high school students, interest in taking an online class rose 21 percentage points from 2007 to 2008, with a 46 percentage-point increase seen among middle school students. According to one-third of the sixth- through 12th-grade students surveyed, online classes make it easier for students to succeed, because they are more comfortable asking questions and can review class materials as many times as they want or need.

re•fuse•nik (n) somebody who refuses to agree to, take part in, or cooperate with something, especially on grounds of principle (informal)

Student must learn to use technology to do things other than surf the web and update their MySpace accounts (See my previous piece: Eating the Napkins). Research, collaboration, problem solving, and content creation are all things that need to be taught in school,

After a certain amount of time, if students are not receiving the proper technology integration in their classes, parents just have to say “You are not a digital immigrant. You are a digital Refuseniks, and we won’t tolerate that silliness any longer. My kid needs technology instruction just as much as she needs math and reading. There are no excuses for not having it. What is this school doing to help my child use technology?”

consume like crazy AND continue to freely share, even when everything inside of me screams against it. This year has taught me that there are and will continue to be many times that others won't get it, or simply won't care about the radical ways technology is changing everything, especially education. When I feel like clutching new know

According to a 2007 Pew/Internet study,1 49 percent of Americans only occasionally use information and communication technology. Of the remaining 51 percent, only 8 percent are what Pew calls omnivores, “deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications.”

Shaping user behavior is a “soft” problem that has more to do with psychological and social barriers to technology adoption. Academia has its own cultural mores, which often conflict with experimenting with new ways of doing things. Gardner Campbell put it nicely last year when he wrote, “For an academic to risk ‘failure’ is often synonymous with ‘looking stupid in front of someone’.”2 The safe option for most users is to avoid trying something as risky as new technology.

The first instinct is thus to graft technology onto preexisting modes of behavior.