TW's Bog

 I've never really understood why education seems to stay away from teaching students how to use social media.  In another class I'm in for ISLT, we researched different college-level courses and gathered data from their syllabi.  Interestingly, almost every class didn't use social media as a tool.  Whether for communication, collaboration, or research, it seemed that social media wasn't thought of. This is strange.  Social media is around us wherever we go as we go about our lives.  Want to keep up with family?  Find any cool new restaurants in town?  Learn from some of your favorite creators?  All of that can be found on your favorite social media app. And yet, we don't teach students how to use social media.  We don't teach students that this can be a huge tool instead of just mindless scrolling.  How great would it be if we could teach high schools about the importance of creating a positive and powerful online presence?  O...

 Social Media is no longer a fad.  I'd say social media is now ingrained into our lives.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing as it allows people from all over the world, from all sorts of backgrounds, to engage with one another and share information.  As recently as 2019, Dennen theorized about the Network Knowledge Activity (NKA) in which learners participate in learning activities in their online networks. Within this theory, there are six different steps: Collect, Curate, Share, Broker, Negotiate, and Construct.  These steps help create social media-based learning among users.  With the rise of online groups, networks, and other communities, learning on social media is becoming a main tool for many around the work, no matter the level of education.   Even this past week as we worked on observing learning environments, we could see how tools like NKA might be utilized extremely effectively.   This week I am going to dive more into Denn...

Observing two online communities geared toward lawn care has been super interesting to partake in.  One community is focused on Florida lawns while the other is focused on an and all lawns.  As someone with a Florida lawn, because...well...I live in Florida, and it's extremely helpful to have specific answers to my specific questions on Florida lawn pests, weeds, etc.  While the other community is great, the plethora of content is a little overwhelming. This goes back to one of my earlier posts contemplating if learning communities can get too big.  I think they certainly can.  The more focused a group is, I think its users can share more precise content and learn more about certain areas that interest them.  By focusing on just the right content, you can buy just the right community of people that are curious about that topic.  For example, if I created a Facebook group for people that only fished in Salt Water Bays, that group would have a more detai...

Kind of convenient timing really reading about copyright issues in education and also keeping track of a few content creators on YouTube that are dealing with copyright strikes On YouTube, a copyright strike occurs whenever a creator uploads a video that has content from another entity and proper credit was not given.  If this happens many times to a channel, that channel can be delisted, which means they no longer show up anywhere on the site.  Now when it comes to using content, there is the Fair Use law.  Now that law is super complicated and I am not going to do the explanation justice.  But know this Fair Use allows those movie clips or clips of Seinfield to stay in videos throughout the internet.  Especially Fair Use states that as long as the content is being used in a fresh way, either a remix, parody, or out of context from the original entity, it's all good. However, many sites like YouTube have struck creators for fair use violations when pushed by la...

 In high school, all those moons ago, I remember every teacher saying something like, "And don't use Wikipedia as a source for your paper.  You can't trust anything on there." Now, that was around 2009, so maybe it was warranted once Wiki became a pretty popular site.  Now, in 2022, I'd say most people generally trust the content on Wikipedia.   Wikipedia acts as a sort of open-source database on anything and everything.  Over the years, the site now has a large volunteer base that keeps track of changes and updated content created by general users that make any sort of change.  I really do understand the stress that was had over not trusting something that literally anyone on the planet can edit.  But now, since Wiki is popular worldwide and tracks and edits the changes, I think the fear of this tool should be a thing of the past. The benefits of using this resource greatly outweigh the negatives.  Another super helpful aspect of the site is...

 I haven't used Reddit in a long, long time.  It's super refreshing to dive back in a see what makes this site one of the most popular forums on the internet.   One of the most interesting aspects is that all the content is user-controlled, at least to my understanding.  On different threads (topics), moderators, aka real Reddit users, can essentially control content in that if any moderators see content as inappropriate or off-topic, they can remove said content or even the users from the thread.  One actual funny topic on this. I've got a podcast on farming and tech in the agriculture space, so every now and then I would go on Reddit and post my podcast on different threads.  I jumped onto the Farming thread and posted about the show.  I accidentally skipped over the rules of the thread and wound up getting banned!  The rules states "no self-promotion" which makes sense, but something I certainly should have paid attention to.   I...

For our next assignment, the full version of Community Norms instructs us to find two online communities and identify several factors such as strengths and weaknesses as well as factors towards how those communities are sustained over the long run.  This assignment is actually really, really interesting in that it allows us to look for trends, identify successful engagement strategies, etc.  And for someone like myself that is trying to build an online community, this will be extremely helpful. The first community that I will be observing is the Florida Lawn Care Nuts on Facebook.  First, go ahead and break out your New Balance sneakers  because this one really makes me feel like an old man.  This page is for people who love DIY lawn care and getting their lawns as pristine as the greens at the Agustina National golf course.  Members share tips and tricks, best practices, and generally, just share any knowledge they have.  I've asked countless question...