As the early days of the mobile communication evolution roll on, we are challenged to envision where “things are headed” in order to understand media in the mobile age. That’s one of PSA’s 7 Core Elements.

Snapchat is one tool for immersing people into a “pool” of shared video access, whether one to one, one to many, many to many, or many to one. Periscope, Vine, YouTube, Vimeo, are some of the players in that space that we know about, but there are more everyday.

A social learning construct, or the framework that enables collaborative learning, has a lot in common with communities of users on Snapchat, because the content is sourced from the users themselves. We are just beginning to see what that might create, and how to “harness it” to support learning.

For example, crowed sourced content from an enterprises’ workforce on the job, can turn into a network of learning opportunities for all involved, depending on how well designed the interface between users might be.

Here’s a story from the NYTimes, that talks about how Snapchat is trying to crowd source one form of “news”. It happens to be about political news, but it could be about any sort of news, and what is news but a form of curated information that is currently useful?

Note that the story seems to say that the experience of the users creating the snapchat video, is as important as what the video content turns out to include. IOW, the user experience is part of what is being communicated and shared, and this has a LOT of implications for designing social learning constructs of all kinds.

To say it another way, understanding media in the mobile age involves understanding that users (students etc) want to be involved in a holistic way that includes not only the content up “on stage” or on screen”, and not only a back channel for “outside the core content” exchanges, but they want to connect in a way that allows sharing of a “personal POV” on the story being told.

[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Snapchat-Bets-Big-on-Quick-Fire-Approach-to-Campaign-Coverage-The-New-York-Times.pdf”]