What social media does for journalism.

Photo by somegeekintn

A recent post on Mashable described some of the ways that social media is changing investigative journalism. The use of the crowd, or rather, the community (as they point out - an engaged group of people who are connected) as sources to uncover the solutions to various mysteries seems to be popping up all over.

I can see some potential for how educators could harness this, but I can imagine that it would take a significant amount of engagement to create a community that would respond to an inquiry for information. I'm imagining a teacher (or a student) putting out a research question or a class discussion topic to get input from the experts. Or a student doing research getting people to help them out by checking out the price of a gallon of milk. But first, you'd have to have the following, or at least, a responsive community.

I'm not engaged enough to feel like I have this as an option, but I can't help thinking of my other class, in which the professor described the responsive community in her LinkedIn Group, and how a student could ask a question and, because my Prof was the moderator and gave it a spotlight, it got TONS of responses. What a great way to get information fast and from the source!