I was having a conversation with a friend about online vs offline activism. She does not use Twitter and cannot see online activism happening. Her view is that offline campaigns are generally the most successful.

And I absolutely agree. But I think that having an online community does fuel the offline activity whatever it is. Technology and ‘being online’, if used correctly, is a powerful catalyst for any form of activism.

I am a big advocate of online community, although truth is in order to obtain highly engaged participants, most of the activities have to happen offline.

There are many engagement models out there but I love Priscilla‘s best because its simple and easy to understand.

According to her:

In my levels of engagement chart, a simple action involves befriending (e.g. MySpace), subscribing, forwarding and/or learning. An easy action involves blogging, signing petitions, protesting and/or wearing a badge/shirt/wristband. A specific action involves donating, volunteering, finding events to attend, downloading and using online materials offline and/or creating and uploading video/images. Once you become an active member, you are doing offline actions more than online actions.

I am not sure if I agree with protesting and volunteering being on the sympathiser end of the chart. I think they are more likely to be ‘active members’.

It is easy, although it takes a long time and strategies, to start an online community. Social media made it even easier for us to build our social network and pump out our cause; however, when it comes down to action, the personal relationship and real action still has to happen offline.

Technology provides the medium and is a catalyst for many activism.

You can organise an event on Facebook, invites people to come but what matters in the end is the number of people that turn up, not the number who said they are attending the event. In this case, Facebook provided the tool and catalyst to be able to invite more people than traditional medium can.

coconinoco

I don’t think that the involvement as sympathiser should be undermined, but every organisation would love to move their participants up to become activists. There is value in having a large number of sympathisers but when it come to impact, I think activists contribute more. Moving participants up the levels is the challenge. More on that next time.

I’m not sure if I understand online activism well enough but would love to hear your thoughts.

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So, I am back to blogging, except this time I am turning this blog from a personal blog to more of a blog about what I do and interesting things I come across especially in my research area of education and engagement, and my interest in social change which encompasses social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

I’ve been meaning to blog about stuff that comes across my mind and interesting things I’ve read, but I have just been really lazy and busy to organise my blog to write them, so I have resulted in tweeting them instead.

However, there are times when I’d come across interesting things I like to discuss, for example recently I had a discussion with Mark Lobo about my research work looking at how tertiary education should be teaching students ‘to be’ rather than ‘about’ a subject and Mark pointed out that its especially true for courses like Art (e.g. photography). Theories you learn in courses can sometimes be so overwhelming and limiting that you lack the ability to think outside the box; which I believe is the same for many other courses. Assignments these days require students to regurgitate information that’s readily available and most works we get at university are based on pre-determined outcomes, which defeats the purpose of doing it don’t you think? A good example would be Science experiments, especially in first year – we all know what the results are going to be and we are forced to follow a step-by-step recipe book style experiment, which I don’t understand why we are doing it in the first place.

Ah well. More to come as my research continues.

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