Expertise in social media — sites like Facebook and Twitter — might be useful for something besides keeping in touch with friends and following the actions of celebrities. According to Fast Company, South Carolina’s Newberry College is about to launch a program that will allow students to major in social media and related technology.

Although the idea strikes some as absurd, in reality, student desire to conquer the medium really exists, with many believing that this kind of expertise might a necessary marketing tool in the future. The program is designed as a blend of graphic design, business & marketing, psychology and statistics according to Tania Sosiak, associate professor of graphic design and social media at Newberry College. She said that this was the first interdisciplinary major offered at Newberry.

Opinions on the new program can best be summarized as “unenthusiastic.” Amora McDaniel, assistant editor for the Upstart Business Journal, appears uncertain about it. She thinks that if the major is designed well, it could help to solidify social media as part of any well-designed business plan and that companies might begin to seek out employees who have the skills to execute it.

Yet, with the price of college tuition continuing to be a concern, and as an increasing number of people raise questions about the value of investment in a degree, this could serve as a perfect demonstration of the kind of trivial majors that erode a college’s prestige.

Fast Company is just as skeptical.

Now, we agree that Web 2.0 (if we can use so outmoded a phrase) is all about the social experience of the web, with a side serving of revolution in mobile social Net access. Obama leveraged Facebook to win an election, social media sites break news, and important info like earthquake alerts before the mainstream media has even warmed up its cameras, and heck, even his Pope-iness himself has taken to Twitter. But is a major in social media really something you want to slap on your resume alongside your Klout score? (And did you see what I did there?).

There are reasons to be concerned. On the news segment about the program, an example of what students will learn was given involving “marketing” a product or a service using QR codes, “those little black and white scanners you use with your smartphone.” For anyone with even a little bit of digital savvy, this raises more questions than it answers — especially since QR codes are considered a rather unsophisticated technology and generally isn’t the best way to spread the word about anything.

So…last time we looked, the QR code was frowned upon by almost everyone, everywhere (though it does linger in the U.S.). And surely one worry is that by the time students graduate in 2017, with the course starting in 2013, the rocket-speed development of social media itself will have outpaced their education.

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Presidential elections, especially closely-fought ones, sometimes bring out the worst in the country’s citizens. That seemed to have been the case this November, when, after the reelection of President Barack Obama, more than a few young people took to Twitter to air their frustration with the choices made by the voters.

In response, Gawker media website Jezebel collected the most racially insensitive tweets of the bunch, directed mainly at President Obama, and published them – including the real names of their authors, who were mainly high school students – for their readers to see and judge. According to Ken Paulson, writing for USA Today, the collection proved a sorry one full of racist epithets, stereotypes and “with N-word in abundance.”

In some cases, Jezebel bloggers even contacted the students’ schools to seek comment from administrators about the tweets.

Although the the list no doubt garnered Jezebel many pageviews, what it didn’t garner them was many friends. Technology news website GigaOM even asked if what Jezebel was doing crossed the line into cyberbullying. When does this kind of denunciation of sentiments expressed by fairly young adults go too far?

The answer to that is never. It would be a mistake to mischaracterize the denunciation of racially offensive speech as abusive. To the contrary, that give-and-take (or more precisely “say something deeply offensive and get verbally pummeled”) is what free speech in America is all about. That’s the flaw in virtually every strategy to keep students in both high school and college on the social media straight and narrow. High school is all about preparing the next generation for citizenship. We teach them civics, history, a smattering of math and science and hand them a diploma. But we too often also try to control their every move. That’s literally the case with the news last week that a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio was expelledafter refusing to carry an ID with a computer chip designed to track the movements of every student in the school.

Although Paulson mischaracterizes the story in question – the student refused to wear both RFID-fitted ID card and the one that with the tracking technology removed, offered as a compromise – he insists that schools have been treading a little too heavily on the free expression rights of their students all while attempting to shield them. The Supreme Court has previously found that even when in a school building, neither students nor teachers can be lawfully deprived of their First Amendment rights.

Some feel that by going overboard protecting students from the consequence of their speech, schools are robbing them of the opportunity to learn how to take advantage of these rights responsibly. Learning about both the freedom and the responsibility that comes from exercising your free speech is one of the main steps to becoming a full participant in U.S. democracy – something that schools shouldn’t be taking steps to actively discourage.

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Twitter, the popular social media service, is launching a new effort to even out what it sees as in imbalance in the percentage of females represented in the fields of science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM.) Although women are now outnumbering men when it comes to college diplomas, they continue to avoid tech fields despite efforts by education institutions to lure them to the programs via graduate scholarships and fellowships. Educators are also working to encourage girls in elementary, middle and high school to get interested in science and related fields.

In a post on Twitter’s blog today the social media company announced that they were partnering with one such organization, Girls Who Code. Girls Who Code is an organization focused on introducing high school-age girls to technological and engineering fields – computer science, specifically. On the organization’s website they note that women account for a mere 14% of the computer science degrees received each year, despite receiving 57% of all bachelor degrees overall.

During an 8-week program held over the summer break in New York, high school-aged girls will get introductory lessons on basics on coding and computer science in an attempt to get them excited to major in the discipline during college. In addition, participants will get paired with a female mentor who is already a tech professional in a company operating in the sector, including the primary sponsor, Twitter.

The Girl Who Code is the idea of Reshma Saujani, a former Deputy Public Advocate of New York City and the program’s founder. Her main goal is to allow private and public entities to work together in order to close the gender gap in the STEM fields.

 In 2010, Reshma became the first South Asian woman to run for Congress, promoting smarter policies to spur innovation and job creation. Advocating for a new model of female leadership focused on risk-taking, competition and mentorship, Reshma is the author of a new book entitled, Women Who Don’t Wait in Line, to be released by Amazon Publishing in 2013.

Kristen Titus, who is the program’s executive director, in using her many years of expertise in channeling the philanthropic efforts of private companies and other corporate entities. She was also a managing director of Jumo.com, social network she co-founded with Facebook’s Chris Hughes. She left the company after running its programming and product development division in 2010.

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Cornell University’s New York City technological school has announced that they have secured the services of ex-Twitter chief technology officer Greg Pass, who will become the NYC campus’ ‘Founding Entrepreneurial Officer’. His duties will include maintaining a good relationship between the campus and the tech community and enhancing communication between academia and the city’s technology firms. He will run student workshops for coding, hacking and advanced programming while encouraging the development of entrepreneurial skills.

“The tech campus is all about bringing together academic research and industry know-how, and no one has more relevant industry experience than Greg Pass,” said Dan Huttenlocher, founding dean of CornellNYC Tech. “Greg advised Cornell throughout the proposal process, and now, by making the entrepreneurial officer one of the campus’s first hires, CornellNYC Tech is ensuring that the tech industry is a part of what we do from the start.”

Pass will be one of what Cornell hopes will be several key public faces of the new campus. His work as a leader at AOL and Twitter made him an expert on engineering problems associated with the Internet age and Cornell expect him to be an inspiration to their students. Pass will have a role in informing the curricula as well as direct teaching of advanced students.

Pass said:

“In the tech industry I’ve experienced first-hand how talented and entrepreneurial engineers are at the heart of productive change. Now, I am honored to be joining the Cornell Tech team as we build a new kind of applied science education — one that will better cultivate young engineers for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new value in collaboration with the start-ups and creative companies that are making New York City a world tech leader.”

During his tenure at Twitter he spent three years constructing, recruiting and merging the team of engineers which kept Twitter stable, expanding and current. Pass graduated from Cornell in 1997 with a major in Computer Science.

“I see this as a unique opportunity to give back to my profession and figure out how to better cultivate the types of students interested in making an impact. How can we actually educate those types of students better and give them a better education to increase the size and quality of the talent pool.”

CornellNYCTech was chosen as the winner of the city’s Applied Sciences competition in December. Classes at CornellNYCTech are expected to begin in the fall in temporary space at Google’s Manhattan building, but as of now the admissions system is still in development.

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Josephson, now in her third year at Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington, said:

“Twitter essentially prepared me to go into my second year and not give up.”

“I never would have imagined that it would have been the place to find support.”

Josephson is known to fellow Tweeters as @dontworryteach and is part of a small but growing number of teachers using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world, writes Emma Brown at the Washington Post.

The help and advice teachers share through Twitter is far more useful than traditional school training programs, many say. The medium is something of an antidote to the fixed agendas, airless rooms and canned speeches by hired experts of standard programs.

Greg Kulowiec, a virtual colleague of Josephson’s who teaches in Plymouth, Mass., said:

“I always tell people the most valuable 15 minutes I spend, in terms of my professional growth, is when I jump on Twitter at night and see what’s going on.”

Twitter is used by teachers to share tips on anything from education technologies to facilitating classroom discussions and teaching about the Cold War.

“After a really good chat, all you are is excited to go back to work and try something,” said Kulowiec, an eight-year veteran of the classroom.

“It’s very motivating to see other people motivated.”

A community of teachers Tweet together – in a forum open to anyone – every Tuesday night via the hashtag #edchat. The weekly event started in 2009 and, at first, there were about a hundred participants, according to co-founder Shelly Terrell.

Now there are more than 2,000 participants each week, and the topic to be discussed is decided in an online poll. The participants use all the hallmarks of a twitter conversation, marking their tweets with the hashtag #edchat, making it easy for anyone to search for the conversation, read and contribute, writes Brown.

The original chat has spawned dozens of other regular education Tweet-ups.

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