@podnosh is the man who started Social Media Surgeries.  These events which are run by volunteers and free to attend, aim to pass on knowledge about social media to orgnaisations (primarily third sector) who’d like to know what it is, how it’s relevant and what (if anything) they should use or be on.

Language such as ‘be on’ is one of the many barriers groups face and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy volunteering as a surgeon because it really gets you thinking about how often and how easily you use words or phrases that seem commonplace but are in fact jargon to many and the session presents an opportunity to explain or discuss the terms properly. The digital world is moving so quickly that it isn’t just new words needing to be learnt but whole other ways of thinking, which brings me back to @podnosh and his most recent blog on how to explain the internet: ‘Is that on google or the internet?’

I read the post whilst at Bar Camp Barnsley and decided to take advantage of fellow campers to add on any other descriptions, mainly I was greeted with ‘Hmmm… yeah good question!’ one person described it as ‘Everything! A way to consume entertainment or to make it, a library, all the information you could want!’  The interesting thing was the focus on what it ‘was’ shifted with the general conversation we were having, so the capacity of the internet to entertain was the focus of those who had recently been in sessions on gaming and powerpoint karaoke (a game where a presentation is selected at random from an internet site like slideshare and then someone who’s never seen it before presents it). Whereas those who’d seen Nick’s original request talked more about it’s library-like ability. I wonder if that’s because it’s just capable of so many things it’s tricky to define it in anyway that’s easily understood. Re-reading Podnosh’s post again today I enjoyed one of the comments which likened the internet to a ‘kitchen junk drawer’ it’s so true but I wonder if it’s the kind of explanation which would inspire confidence in nervous learners?

It reminded me that the best description I ever heard given was by James Wallbank at Access Space to a group of teenagers obsessed with Bebo and MySpace, he was trying to explain that these sites aren’t just there to consume, that they come from somewhere and from something. He showed them the ‘whois’ command, that is he got the computer he was working on to find out where Bebo was in the real world and who it was listed as being run by*, then he got the group to think about what Bebo must be if it was in a physical space and was maintained by a real company. Long story short the group eventually decided that the internet must be a computer, so we talked about could it really be one computer and they agreed ‘no’ it must be lots of computers.

It’s not the kind of session that works for every group and I think it might be a certain type of learner who needs to get that bit of the internet before they can learn about other parts of it but when it clicks that the internet isn’t one incomprehensible thing, it’s a product of those tangible objects we’re looking at as we discuss it, it can be a magic moment and often helps people grasp that the parts of the internet they want to learn more about aren’t so out of their reach either.

Comments on ways to explain the internet are more than welcome below (or on Podnosh’s original blog).

[* If further information on what 'whois' is, leave a comment and I'll try to get a good explanation up on here but the above is the best I could muster for today]