In conventional learning, the teacher always knows more than the students. So the one imparts knowledge to the other, before assessing their understanding.
With social media, this can’t be the case. For one thing, the teacher is probably a digital immigrant; the learner will usually be a digital native. For another thing, no one has much more experience than anyone else and the academics and thinkers haven’t had time to overcomplicate (bad) or simplify (good) the field.
So we don’t teach conventionally in this area; we learn by doing.
Kevin Dugan’s Valentine’s Day plea for passion in social media still resonates, a day late.
PR Studies 
I wish I knew more than my students. I wish I knew more than me…
“we learn by doing”
Yes, it is more interesting. Only when I did it did I realise how little I knew! Even though I have been set up my own blog before coming to Leeds, I spent a lot of time to set up my new blog and think about the topic here because of the different system and language.
I started my blog to learn by doing. I fully agree that students are the natives. However, there are some general aspects of communication and PR that students need to grasp in order to make social media truly useful in PR (e.g. symmetrical communication) and in fact social media helps demonstrate how PR is distinct from other disciplines.
So, teaching becomes more dialogue than monologue, which is as old as Socrates and as hip as Parker Palmer in “Courage to Teach.”
I jumped from print journalism into a comms role at The Open University and one of my key aims is to get to grips with the digital side of things. It was all a bit foreign to start with but learning by doing is the only way.
Getting stuck in and trying out these new technologies, learning from my mistakes along the way, has certainly worked for me.