Social media labs, as spaces for experimentation, have recently become one of the main mechanisms for innovation. The role of universities, with degrees focused on subjects linked to social innovation, can be a fundamental factor in social development. It is essential to transform traditional centres into spaces for dialogue, into creative ecosystems, simultaneously dedicated to reflection and debate, research and production, training, and socialisation. Within this framework, we carried out ethnographic research on the implementation of a social media laboratory developed with social education students during the last two academic years at the Faculty of Education in Palencia. The results provide evidence of the development by university students in some skills related to creativity, reflection and debate, as well as various digital skills. In line with the existing literature, we show how the social media laboratory enables the acquisition of knowledge situated in the social reality of the environment that is of great use to future social educators, as well as some of its limitations in these processes of experimentation and social innovation.

We propose to think of the media lab as a bet, a prototype or lab model that addresses the transformation of knowledge production processes, the reformulation of university institutions and the role of the humanities in influencing social processes from the defence of the commons as a local and situated expression of a capacity for resilience. Following this line, a prototype is a tentative, provisional, incomplete, experimental, open product. Prototyping is not so much about finding solutions as it is about making sure that the problems are well understood or, in other words, that we have been critical enough to explore the consequences of our designs and to make sure that we have taken into account almost all possible points of view.

In this study, we investigated the implementation of a project called "Social Media Laboratory for Young People" as an example of content creation that combines multimedia (images, video, text, audio) with the development of participatory cultures and the acquisition of digital competences. This project was conducted with the aim that the students of the Degree in Social Education go from being mere consumers to co-producers of the narrative, generating new opportunities for social, cultural and professional development. To this end, we propose the following objectives: 

1.      To examine social media laboratories based on the production, research and dissemination of socio-educational projects that explore new forms of creative experimentation and collaborative learning that arise within university environments in the hyper-connected society.

2.      To stimulate social innovation and citizenship projects developed at the university, offering open platforms for collaboration between students and social agents to promote knowledge as a common good.

3.      Promote the development of digital competences among university students in an environment of learning ecologies as part of their training in the contexts of expanded education.

The study carried out can be considered an ethnographic research, as the focus of attention is centred on the exploration of the technomedia productions (in their different formats) through which future social educators shape ways of acting and configure meanings in the hyperconnected environment. The research process was carried out during the first semester of the 2021/22 academic year within the framework of two subjects belonging to the Degree in Social Education at the University of Valladolid: Citizen Participation (basic training) and Social Media (optional), in the third and fourth year respectively, located in the Faculty of Education in Palencia. Based on research designs and frameworks linked to the relationships between technology, participation and media, the following research questions regarding laboratories and digital competences have been developed for this study: - What productions have been implemented to develop the skills needed in a hyper-connected society? - How do classroom practices facilitate the connection between university and society? - What methodological strategies have been used to develop the different competences selected? At the same time, and given that our research aimed to analyse the social experience mediated by digital technologies and social media, our enquiry was not only focused on the media ecosystem, but also on the opportunity to use the network as a research tool, so we used digital ethnography as a mechanism that allowed us to examine the relationships between the virtual and face-to-face spheres, also understanding that the emergence of radio, television, computers, smartphones, the Internet, search engines, the web, e-mail, social networks, etc. , have influenced and mediated personal interrelationships. For this reason, the study includes the collection and analysis of aspects linked to the analogue and face-to-face reality of the classroom, as well as the elements of teaching and the virtual/digital reality of the participants. The research techniques used respond to the complexities of digital ethnography: 1) analysis of the audiovisual productions made by the future social educators in digital format, together with their reflective texts; 2) classroom observations carried out by an external observer who was present in the two classrooms to analyse the work dynamics in the process of making the media laboratories.

Media labs add a pragmatic dimension, the capacity to produce collaborative solutions. This capacity involves incorporating people's creativity into policy production, through innovation processes that include and combine diverse knowledge. Chief among these is their extensive capacity for trial and error. This enables agile error analysis, while facilitating rapid learning, which avoids the cost of larger errors and converts it into accumulated knowledge for the institution. It is a model, therefore, that allows for error and transforms it into learning, but also does so as part of its very nature. We always move at the level of experimentation and prototyping of the projects that form part of a labor-atory, of the design of the laboratory itself and of the programme in which it is inserted. The development of social media labs in the university environment generates new opportunities for innovation, incorporating the hacker spirit within sometimes century old institutions. Digital transformation, openness and social involvement take on a new dimension that is rare in higher education institutions. The innovation that the lab brings is materialised in the materialisation of the principles and forms learned in the digital sphere and the generation of open and shared innovation processes. They are configured as generative platforms oriented towards production as opposed to the idea of a portal that shows closed content to consumer users. They are also a way of exploring the continuity of the physical and digital dimensions, far from false dichotomies between the real and the virtual.

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