Reflection on EME 6414 (Web 2.0)

I was always wondering how I could use social media in education. Though I undefinedly thought it would be great to utilize the collaborative features of social media in formal learning, I was not quite sure how I could use social media in education without any resistance or distraction.

I had several interviews with undergraduate students this Spring and most of them said that they had very limited experiences of using social media in their classes. Many said they just watched YouTube videos, used Google office for a group project, or searched for some additional resources related to their course topics. I also confirmed this unpopularity of social media in formal learning from some journal articles. However, it seemed like students used social media a lot for the informal learning. In fact, social media activities in a formal learning have also been somewhat informal in the way it was operated and assessed. Instructors usually used social media for an extra communication tool and did not count those activities in the course grading.

During this summer, for a short six-week period, I got introduced many new tools from Web 2.0 class and tried them in different ways. We learned about network individuals, produsage, crowdsourcing, social bookmarking, folksonomies, PLN, and privacy issues. While studying these topics and doing my assignments, I could think about the usage of social media in education on a deeper level. Also, our classmates shared so many great ideas and perspectives together. What a collective intelligence!

I know some students feel distracted to use social media in formal learning or just do not like social media for privacy reasons. This negativity is very much related to their intensity of social media use and performed perception of using social media in education. Yes, we still have many issues of employing social media in our classrooms…but there are so many good things as well as bad things. We need to find some good ways to get over the risks and issues rather than just giving up. Anyway, Web 2.0 was really a fun and useful course that I would never forget. I would strongly recommend this course to other ISLT students. I actually think this course should be required. :-)

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Curation and knowledge sharing

As Vanessa said people are incredibly generous in the areas where they have passion. It is so true…Since I like music and violin, I decided to explore online violinist communities and share information and knowledge from those communities. I visited the violinist community at Google+ first, but it was very disappointing because it was static and rarely updated. However, I found two active violinist communities: a subreddit r/violinist and violinist.com website. In these communities, violinists from professional musicians to novice students had gathered and helped each other. Well, in most cases, novices got help from professional musicians and teachers. But, those experts were so willing to answer any questions from beginners. The online forums were full of useful knowledge and information. Though I could look up any topics using the keyword search, I thought it would be great if I rearranged some useful knowledge and information using curation technique from multiple sources. That was why I developed a new blog for beginner violinists like me. For every post, I chose one topic and included any relevant things from multiple sources. I started with my own experience and added some experts’ opinions. Then, I listed relevant links to the posts in online forums. I promoted my blog on multiple social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It was amazing to see people from all over the world visited my blog! Currently, my blog is locked for unknown reasons by Google Blogger…I really don’t know why and got mad…Anyway, I will find another good blog service and upgrade my knowledge sharing project with better curation. 

PLN: f2f or online?

I have been building my PLN through face to face meetings until now. I met people at schools, companies, or conferences. Based on these personal connections, I started being connected online to some of them. However, now with Web 2.0 technologies, we can build a connection online first then meet face to face later. But, can I do that? How can I do that? Where can I start from? I found there were many online forums where educators, educational technologists, and instructional designers were interacting with each other. We can also find many educational technology related posts at Twitter using some hashtags such as #edtech. I have been only lurking some online forums or hashtagged posts but have not contributed to those online communities yet. My plan is…First, find more useful online communities and hashtags, Second, try to contribute to those communities whenever I can, and lastly, find some key players in the communities and try to connect with them through their Twitter accounts or blogs. 

Produsage and informal learning

I worked at an AOL-like portal company called ‘Korea.com’ as a service and contents planner for about two years. It was right after I had my master’s degree. I was in charge of the education section and worked with a lot of CPs (Content Providers). I kept thinking about what kinds of contents that I should be sourcing and how to display them in order to attract more users and increase revenue from paid contents. Yes! We were content provider and our users were content consumers. Now with Web 2.0 technologies, users are generating contents and they are consuming those contents. They are produsers! If I knew this Produsage concept 20 years ago, how could I design my education portal? The cost of contents development should have been much cheaper! However, I wonder how I could start the produsage service and lead users to contribute to it. As I created my own produsage forum for my assignment, I had such issues of how to make users subscribe to my forum and voluntarily write some posts. I searched for some similar forums…those forums had more than a thousand subscribers and they were actively generating contents by interacting with one another. How could the moderators spur those interactions? I really wonder… If I built a produsage website for a formal learning, I may not worry about produsers and their interaction because we always have students in our class! I thought informal learning would be easier because there is no lesson plan. But, it turned out to be more difficult to build a community than formal learning. Alas…Will my produsage website ever evolve into a community? I am really wondering… ;-(