Making Connections

Amy Gahran’s presentation, Strategic Commenting,  was really helpful for me in understanding how to build an audience and thinking differently about blogging.  It really helped put the pieces together.  I think prior to this, I thought of blogging more as an online journal without understanding its potential to be social.  Certainly, I hoped other people would find my blog posts interesting and comment on them, but I didn’t expect to get any comments and I didn’t. Yet, I wondered how successful bloggers get an audience.  The readings for this week, really helped me to see the value of using these social media tools as well.  A big paradigm shift needs to be taken in education.  I am fortunate to be in an educational setting where I can experiment.  Also Nancy and Joao gave me hope by posting to my blog and giving advice on how to develop an audience as both of them are experienced at it.  Thanks to both of you!

I am also guilty of having my students use their blogs as a place to post journal entries, final drafts of papers, and a place to post assignments online.  I am not sure how to guide them to making comments on others blogs and to teach them how to develop an audience as of yet.  Probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t do it well myself.  Even though I haven’t yet done this, I am lucky that my students feel comfortable posting to their personal blogs and to a class blog(here are examples of each chaeyoonl.edublogs.org and globalab.edublogs.org).  I think now my classes and I can take that next step together to make it a more social experience.  I’m looking forward to taking that journey with them.  There’s a lot to teach and learn about social media so to start, if anyone has any guidelines that they give to student’s about posting comments I would love to get access to them.

Yvonne C

Exploring Social Media

I opened accounts on all of the social media sites that were suggested. Although, I have not had time to explore all of them thoroughly, one commonality I notice about them all is that they are social. That is, they are all geared towards sharing whether it be quick thoughts as with Twitter or lists such as the 43 Trio or photos as with Flickr and talking about photos with Voicethread. The difference with these seem to amount to their focus as mentioned before.

The main difference that I see with these when compared to LMS is that the audience is much wider. Anyone can access these and comment/connect where as LMS systems are private only for the particular class involved. However, it should be noted that their is the option with the social media to keep it private if you like which is a nice option.

Social Media is a means of sharing your thoughts and ideas with the world via the internet and from that developing communities and resources around common interests. I have used blogs, wikis, 43 places and things to some extent and I enjoy using them, however, I have not had much luck in creating any communities or an audience for what I have added to these platforms. I am looking forward to connecting with more people through this workshop.