Is this thing on?

-

Social media often gets a bad rap.  Kinda like those zero-sugar gummy bears with all the hilarious reviews on Amazon.  And while some of that bad rap is a little deserved, social media is also an amazing tool that has absolutely changed human communication forever.

If you would have told me 20 years ago, that we would almost be obsessed with the number of "likes" and "followers" on our online profiles, I would have called you crazy.  But, now we all obsess over it (to a certain degree, of course, some waaaaaay more than others).  My thought is, can we actually reverse this focus on "likes" and "follows" and instead maybe focus on learning?  

Lately, I've heard a ton of people say "Guess what I learned on TikTok?"  And then they spout off about some cool fact or how they learned to fix a leaky facet.  How cool is that?!  Talk about a shift!  

Maybe we can do that with higher learning too.  Maybe we can build more focus on not just "following" and "liking" people, but instead on following people we want to learn from or people we want to teach. What if we used our selected social media platforms as our own personal learning community?

I swear I didn't read that off the course syllabus.  But I really think this could be a huge shift and fundamentally change how we see and use social media.  And it would actually make us all the better!

Let's buckle up and see!

Wait...Where's my seatbelt?!

Oh right, this is an office chair.  

That would also explain the lack of cupholders...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are we all digital natives?

-
 No, I don't think so.  And here is why. Anytime an iPhone update happens, I ALWAYS get a call from my parents.  Or, anytime I visit my grandparents, they greet me with a quick, "Hey son how are you?  Could you fix our printer?" I was always curious as to why this is. Indeed, my parents and grandparents, who are all super smart, could figure out even what I might consider trivial tech problems, right? Not exactly.  Younger people (I feel really old for saying that) have experienced countless changes with technology over the years.  From going to dial-up internet to wifi, flip phones to iPhones, and even huge desktop computers to building our own gaming computers after watching a few YouTube videos.  We are used to technology.  And honestly, technology has grown alongside us.  As we grow older, most technologies are becoming easier to use because we get more and more used to them. Older generations, not so much.  Most of their lives were spent without internet, tv, and cou
Read more

The Ice Bucket Challange

-
When doing research for this week on activism seen on social media, my first thought went towards things like protesting and fighting for rights.  But, a quick Google search reminded me of a famous movement from a few years ago that is a great example of activism that was started thanks to social media. A few years ago, we all saw viral videos of celebrities, athletes, and our friends and family pouring ice water on them all in the name of fighting ALS.  The disease targets the nervous system and causes irreversible muscle failure.  There still is no cure and no real consensus on what causes it.  In 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge was started and spread across every social media site as people would challenge their friends to pour ice water on themselves to bring awareness to ALS and help raise money for more research.  The challenge was able to raise over $115 million for ALS research.  This fun challenge united a huge amount of people and brought awareness to a disease many were not a
Read more

Technology is getting scary good.

-
 A friend of mine told me about AI Content Generators recently and I thought it would be cool to bring up in this class.  The idea is that artificial intelligence software has gotten so good, that you can simply type in a prompt, and these generators will create articles for you based on one sentence. How wild is that?! So for this experiment, I typed in "The evolution of online education."  Below is the article created using a website AI called, frase.io .  You'll notice some interesting claims, one of which is that "online learning has been around since the early 1900s."  I don't remember reading about MOOCs from the 1930s, but maybe there were? So check it out and be sure to give it a try as well! 1. Online Education Online education has been around since the early 1900s. In fact, some of the first colleges were created that way. However, it wasn't until the late 1990's that we started seeing a huge surge in the number of students taking courses o
Read more