It’s All Coming Together This Week, Isn’t It?

As I worked my way through this week to finish up my PLN paper, a quick realization hit me that what we had done in this course for the past few weeks are still pretty vivid in my mind, and perhaps a little more surreal than I had anticipated the learning experience to be. I had similarly completed a 6-week course earlier in the summer (also by Vanessa), but nothing seems like this course in terms of intensity and immersion level. Perhaps it is a case of DOING A LOT in a 6-week period, or a case of back-to-back summer courses, or the way the course is structured which requires us to explore, probe, experiment and report what we have found. Nevertheless, I believe that the consensus in the class is that this experience is refreshing, we had a lot of fun along the way, and we would definitely not want it any other ways.

As I start to recollect what I have learned in order to describe my preferred PLN, another insight that I derived is that you will never know what you can possibly do, or use something to your advantage, until you personally try it. I was indeed pleasantly surprised throughout the course that most of the social media tools that we were exposed to were very interesting and relatively easy to use, and having occupied a huge chunk of my time in the past few weeks, I am certain that some of them would have big parts to play in my life from this point onwards, whether it is as part of my PLN, or as part of an instructional design in my professional life in the near future, or just simply as social media tools that I could use to regulate and enrich my life. Hence, I am pretty glad that I have taken this course, and would definitely cherish my learning experience from the last 6 weeks!  

Medium - A Place Where You Might Just Be Inspired

Last week, we got to respond to Vanessa's #MediumChallenge, and I must say that I really like this tool very much for its unique features. So I tried it out, played around and what I discovered was a tool that has many distinctive attributes when compared with other similar type platforms. 

What is really interesting about this tool is that it not only serve as a blogging and online publishing platform, but there is also a big and diverse collection of journals and genres that one can explore in their area of interest. From this perspective, Medium could also be considered to be performing as a curation and bookmarking tool designed to curate the most appropriate and interesting materials that would naturally find its audience. 

In essence, Medium is a community that offers unique perspectives on ideas, personal thoughts and experiences, and you would often find interactions between writers and readers through the comment features. Such interactions form the basis for knowledge sharing and exchange of ideas on the platform, and certainly one can observe a great sense of appreciation and respect for diverse viewpoints from the responses. 

Medium is also a network that connects writers to readers, as users could follow each other either on their stories, or on the Twitter platform via the simple buttons on the website. In a nutshell, I find the stories on Medium to be extremely inspiring to the point that I have been frequently using the tool the past few days, so it must be a good thing and therefore I have decided to incorporate it as part of my PLN!

Protecting Yourself on Social Media

We all know of the dangers on social media. Despite the various privacy concerns that we constantly face on these social networks which we had used extensively to share our lives with the world, there seems to be no real urgency for most people to take proactive actions in order to mitigate the risks to their privacy on social media. Therefore, I am putting these 6 simple tips out to remind ourselves what we can do to better protect our personal information on social media sites that we frequently use.

1. The first tip is to recognise that nothing is temporary in the online environment. Even if you posted something and delete it later, you will never know if someone has already copied it. Therefore, always think carefully before you put any information out there, especially stuff that is personal to you.

2. Manage your privacy settings. It always pays off in reviewing who you are connecting with, and what information you are sharing with them.

3. Don’t fill out ALL your social media profile. Review your personal profile information and only share things that you deem necessary. Putting your personal phone numbers, birth dates and family details on social media is not exactly the best thing to do if you care about your privacy online.

4. Use strong passwords, change them frequently, and adopt multiple passwords for different social media platforms. This is rather intuitive, as you do not want anyone, in a case of a phishing attack, to lay their hands on your ONE password and the access to all your social media accounts.

5. Turn off location settings on your social media platforms. By default, a lot of such platforms have direct connection to the GPS feature of your mobile devices, revealing your current location unknowingly to strangers who may access your profiles.

6. When you do not need them anymore, remember to CLOSE your old social media accounts and delete as much personal information from them as possible.

Sources:

https://blogs.mcafee.com/consumer/10-tips-protect-social-networks/

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/24/11-simple-ways-to-protect-your-privacy/

Social Media Privacy Policy - Do You Know All Of Them?

In this week, we explore the issues of privacy and ethics on social media. I would say this is a rather important topic that a lot of people unfortunately do not really pay attention to, simply because people are more interested in good "stuff" that social media provide, and more often than not do not give a dime for the safety and security of the information they are sharing on the platforms.

So when was the last time you read a privacy policy of a social media or networking site which you signed up for? In reality, you will be surprised to know that most of the major social media sites which you may be using now are sharing your personal information with third parties. But wait a minute.....did you actually authorize them to do that? OF COURSE YOU DID, the moment you signed up and clicked on that "allow access to your personal information" button during the registration stage.

In fact, there are only TWO platforms - Google and Foursquare, that have stated that they do not share personally identifiable information about their users with advertisers. Then, what about the rest? Which of YOUR information are they sharing with others?

Facebook - We are all big time users of Facebook, but do you know that it is one of the biggest "sharer" of your information with their partners, advertisers and developers?

Twitter - Now who doesn't love to tweet? But do you know that Twitter reserves the right to sell all of your information in case of bankruptcy, sale, merger, or acquisition of the company? Yes, this is right there in the fine prints of its privacy policy that you had agreed on by using the platform.

Pinterest - You have the rights to use the platform to search for resources, curate items or market your products, but Pinterest also has the rights to share your personal information; such as your names, emails, phone numbers, with third party companies.

So are you getting any worried now?

Knowing the privacy policy of the social platforms that you are using may just be the first step to understanding privacy issues on social media, the many threats that you face, how you can manage your privacy control settings on these sites, and ultimately how to protect yourself and your personal information on social media.  




Source:
http://blog.hotspotshield.com/2013/06/25/social-media-privacy-concerns/

Social Media Uses in the Local (American) Context

Having explored a variety of international perspectives on how other educators in the world are using social media in their classrooms, as well as the effects of social media on education in their respective contexts, it is now timely to come back and look at the American context to understand the state of affairs here and how we are employing social media to support learning. Being widely recognised as the no.1 country in technology innovation and entrepreneuring spirit, I would suppose there will far more interesting ideas on social media integration here in the American education system. Apart from what we are doing in this course (which is a GREAT example) and the many personal and professional example which the folks in this class had shared, some other approaches of using Web 2.0 and social media are:

Students in a particular high school are using online chats to discuss about books they had read in class, using the tool to listen and respond to one another’s opinions with textual evidence.

An AP biology teacher in New Milford High school challenges his students to discuss the stages of meiosis on Twitter using a shared hashtag, of which they would need to exercise creativity and succinctness in their answers as limited by the 140 characters.

Rock Prairie Elementary School in College Station, Texas is using social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to build an online community so that they can share school news, communicate and engage with parent groups.

One particular college is also using social media to facilitate research projects by allowing students to search, discover, post findings, and cross-check statements on the platforms. Through the process, students get to engage with the latest real-time events, engage current problems or issues, discuss findings and provide solutions.

In University of Hawaii, students create and share videos on Instagram to introduce themselves, “meet” on Google Hangouts to discuss issues, and “tweet” to share online resources.

Another college professor is streaming and recording his lectures on Periscope, so that student can ask questions in real-time without interrupting the presentation, and those who missed it could also stream and replay the broadcast later on.

From an educational perspective, and with the way social media had permeated our societies like never before, it seems like a foregone conclusion that utilizing social media to support and facilitate learning in the classroom is the way of the future. However, many considerations still have to be taken in order to adopt the right tools and the right strategies to make social media work for us.

With these examples in mind, I am really looking forward to seeing the creations and products of the Produsage Projects in this class, and hopefully that would provide more ideas and inspiration for us to adopt and adapt social media to support learning.   

Sources:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/273044

http://www.teachercast.net/2016/06/02/social-medias-influence-education-system/

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2014/11/05/social-media-gains-momentum-in-online-education

https://www.mheducation.com/blog/thought-leadership/how-social-media-can-help-students-study.html

Designing for Community – Additional Things to Think About!

In this week’s voicethread, Vanessa has talked about some important aspects to think about when designing for an online community; such as shared interest, knowledge and communication needs, goals, anxieties and fears. I also commented and shared on certain issues of technology that educators ought to consider, such as learners access to the tools to be used. Planning for the use of Web 2.0 technology and social media tools can often be a daunting and challenging process, and I would like to suggest a few more aspects to consider:

1. For any learning to take place and flourish, student safety and security is paramount and must be ensured. Instructional designers must therefore design and provide an online environment that is safe for student interactions and closed for the sole purpose of participation by only the learners within the community.

2. There should also be clarity in the instructions to the learners. They must be clear on what to do on the platforms, and what needs to be done to achieve the requirements. If there are assessments within the course, students should also be informed on how and when they would be evaluated for their participation or performance.

3. To enhance the learning experience, no Web 2.0 technology or social media tool should be used in isolation. Instead, plan for a variety of tools and platforms for an enhanced student engagement. On the other hand, using too many tools might also be problematic for learners! Careful thought must be accorded to select the right combination of tools that learners would be comfortable with.

4. Finally, similar to a F2F class, teacher presence in an online environment is very critical as well! As learning in an online community is largely asynchronous in nature, the instructor is even more so important to show his/her presence online to facilitate the activities and provide feedback when necessary.

Source: http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/issue51-classroom01/

Social Media in Singapore’s education landscape

In this post, we will continue to explore how Singaporeans are using social media in their lives, but this time more specifically in the educational context. Singapore has always been considered as having a high-performing education system, but exactly how have we adopted and used social media to support learning in our system? So I went to google in the hope of exploring cases where educators had employed Web 2.0 technologies and social media in the classrooms. The results were interesting and encouraging, and this was what I found:

A secondary school history teacher is using Edmodo (social learning network) for his students to upload photo montages about the Cold War, so that they can showcase their products, share viewpoints and comment on each other’s work at their own convenience. On the same platform, the teacher also upload resources and notes, facilitate discussion boards and create quizzes to assess his student’s understanding.

Another group of 4 secondary school teachers are bringing social media into the classroom to help engage their students in literature study. Again, Edmodo is again the preferred tool for students to live out their lives of the main characters in their literature textbook "Red Sky in the Morning". They learn by posting status updates on Edmodo as those characters, and as the story progressed, their status updates had to reflect the change and growth of the characters. In addition, students also interact within a closed Facebook group that was specially set up for the class, using the platform to discuss their literary opinions and share materials.

In a local university, a professor is using Facebook to teach a Business Communication Course. A closed group was set up to facilitate the learning process; the professor had used the platform to connect with his students, share resources, communicate information and facilitate group discussions.

A polytechnic math lecturer is using Twitter to send out math problems and asking the students to “tweet” out the answers, while projecting the responses on a screen in front of the class in real time.  

     

These are just some examples of how Singapore educators are employing social media to support learning in the classrooms.

Do you identity with any of the strategies above?

In the context that you are familiar with, are there other interesting social media strategies that you had come across to support learning in the classroom?