Entry #2: Social Media & Education + Trying new things!
First of all, I wanted to thank Sam for telling me why she uses tinyurl.com. I’ve heard of it and clicked on links through it a bunch of times, but I never used it for myself (i.e., I never had to use it). But upon doing our group discussion activity that we did the other week, and needing to have students sign up to be in small groups for the quarter, I decided to give it a shot.
So, using tinyurl clickthrough links with customized link names, I had all of the students in each of my groups go into Google docs that I made and sign up for the role/group they wanted. Other than having annoying permission messups with the google docs for one of my sections, I think it worked pretty well, even with 26 students on it at the same time. I will definitely use this again, the way we did in this class probably next week (since they have midterm review). Can you believe… I actually went pretty old school last TAship and used the chalkboards for group discussion shares! Even though there was a podium device….
Anyhow. In regards to the resource we talked about last week, Multimedia storytelling, powtoons. I’m sort of interested. At the moment, powtoons seems more like a resource I’ll have my section that’s doing the photo essay/video choice check out. Ah. I was trying to find some videos that I made in the past (sort of storytelling?) on… I forgot the name of the program atm since this is a new computer. But I can’t figure out what my account was? Because back then youtube wasn’t google.. Or by this time it was, but then I feel like I remember the option to make a separate account, linked to the same e-mail?? Anyhow, I can’t figure out what my log in is, and the videos were unlisted so I can’t find them. Will post when I do.
While reading the articles for this week, I kept thinking about the purpose of social media. There’s “social” and there’s “media”, although what “media” isn’t social? Why is there the need to reiterate the “social” part? And then why try to make it educational? In general, I think it’s best for keeping in touch and networking, whatever that network might be—high school friends, co-workers, colleagues, family, etc. etc. But then when you try to get this network to interact educationally in this social space… Well actually, I could see why. Since we’ve been talking about sociocultural learning theories and whatnot. But at the same time, I think possibly. All learning in some way is social.. But not all social interactions are necessarily learning. So it’s easier to see the social aspect in learning than it is to see the educational aspect in social interactions (of course, you can be devil’s advocate and say that we learn something from everyone, etc., but obviously that’s not the type of learning/education that the authors of these articles or I are talking about.) I do agree that SNS can promote awareness an activism, but again, in informal contexts. Trying to make it into an educational space… I think it’s great supplementally, but if there are already platforms where things like online courses and distance learning can occur, why are people trying so hard to implement things like Facebook (espesh when things like privacy are concerned)? As Manca & Ranier (2013) report, there was a “strong resistance of students to universities and lectures making formal use of SNSs, thus suggesting that these practices would be better continued unabated and firmly ‘backstage’“ (pg. 489). We’ll find out what you all think tomorrow!
HUAY