The only way for organizations and individuals to realize the benefits of social and participatory media is to learn what they are, how they work, and how to use them. In the same way that we need a media literacy to understand how TV and newspapers work and affect our society, increasingly we need to cultivate a “participatory media literacy,” as described by social media thinker Howard Rheingold, to understand how to leverage the Internet to achieve our goals and meet our needs.

Over the past two years, SMEX has focused on offering training to help develop a participatory media literacy in Lebanon using a variety of social media resources, including well-known applications like Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as lesser-known ones, such as Moodle, Mediawiki, and Open Street Map.

The good news is that most of the applications and devices and their capabilities are relatively simple to learn—and all of them operate on one overarching principle: we human beings like to share. With this in mind, SMEX training focus on teaching the principles of social media as much as on the technicalities of the tools.

We offer both stand-alone workshops in specific tools as well as online training and customized workshops for organizations and/or events. For more information, please get in touch by emailing info [at] smex [dot] org.