No shortage of speculation and grandiose designs in the area of social media these days, but as we look at how to shape education policy using these types of collaborative tools, it's instructive to think about how the actual business of educating is already taking advantage of the new technologies and techniques.

Christopher Dawson over at ZDNet posts usefully on a great series of podcasts from a student at City University of New York.  Well worth a listen during your holiday downtime.

    The take-home message? If social media aren’t changing the way educational content is delivered at your institution, they probably should be. Even if you haven’t jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, there is quite a bit here to feed our thinking about how to modify our curricula using those "21st Century Tools".

The post-election, pre-Inauguration period has given us a chance to review our recent past and look forward (gulp) to the challenges ahead.  It's at once daunting and exhilarating.

Historians will comb over the winning and losing election strategies, and strategists will look to build on successes or reverse negative trends, but the real across-the-board game changer is the heightened interest in civic participation brought forth by these times.

As citizens, we're now looking to the new administration to practice what it preached on the stump, and hoping it can harness this overflowing enthusiasm in the service of effective and efficient government.  Emblematic of this "new way" of doing things are the tremendous advances in interactive tools and the unprecedented ways in which they have been applied to generate real-world results.  Web 2.0 tools and the two-way conversations they foster have surely changed the civic landscape - but their advantages have been limited thus far beyond election cycles and advocacy for various causes.

The time is now for the wisdom and scalability of 2.0 tools to be applied directly to the problems that most need solving. Steve Radick writes in no uncertain terms that the time for theory and pontification has passed, and that government needs to jump headlong into the pool of possibilities:

Our time is now. It’s time to start doing. If you work for the federal government or for a government contractor, there are opportunities galore for you. If you’re sitting in your cubicle reading this, just counting the minutes till you can leave for the day, this is your chance. Social media and the government is your opportunity to stand out and do something to effect real change in our government.

It's hard to argue with the logic, but it remains to be seen whether the massive ship that is the United States can turn nimbly on instructions for evasive action.

So perhaps we should be listening even more closely to the pioneers of distributed publishing and online communities - the people who were thinking in terms of scale and service to the community before it was given a handy moniker.

Writing recently at Huffington Post, craigslist founder Craig Newmark takes note of the various tools already available to both government and the engaged citizenry and makes a series of suggestions to get the ball rolling.

Movements clearly need tools, but so too do tools need practical real-world applications to realize their potential. Newmark's approach is the right one - identifying existing platforms that offer scalable organizing and message dissemination and making them the proving ground for problem-solving of pressing issues.

There's no one-stop-shop for every possible angle of civic engagement or governance, but with the right approach we can take advantage of what's working and make it scale to address national problems. And that's the kind of widget-making that can help get America going in the right direction again.