Glasgow

Our good friends at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS) are planning a series of breakfast workshops during Social Media Week. It’s a demonstration of both the breadth of engagement in Social Media Week and their great generosity of spirit to share their insight and expertise. So we asked them for a blog post – and here it is.

Social media enables people to converse, engage and collaborate in effective and cost-effective ways. IRISS encourages the development of a competent and confident social services workforce by demonstrating how social media can contribute to effective sharing and collaboration. According to Euan Semple, “At a time when most organisations are being called upon to make cuts, it is frustrating that attempts to deploy social tools in those organisations are often deprived of budget. The use of these tools has the potential to cut huge amounts of waste out of the average organisation and to make much more possible with the available resources than ever before.”

We believe that social media is experiential in nature, and that ‘getting your hands dirty’ so to speak, and trying the tools out, is the best way to recognise their value, and how they may influence and improve working (and don’t forget learning!) practices for the better.

So as part of Social Media Week, we are cooking up a series of breakfast workshops, which will give you a short, snappy introduction to some key social media tools and allow you to get those hands dirty!
The workshops will demonstrate, for example, that Twitter is not just about what you had for breakfast (although you can share that if you like!), that social bookmarking can make the organisation and sharing of your online information much easier, that there are more effective ways to manage your news and events, that collaborative working on Word documents doesn’t have to be cumbersome, and that the iPad is the way forward for digital inclusion.

And yes, we will be providing breakfast (croissants, tea, coffee) each morning so plenty of fodder to kick-start the brains and get the chatter going. We look forward to meeting you throughout the week.