Social Media Experiments and Reflections

It’s hard to notice sometimes how our life has changed until we stop a moment and look back to see how different it has been from not long time ago. As this assignment asked for how social media has affected our life, I scrutinize my day-to-day activities and would say social media has significantly impacted more than ever on my daily life. From how we get keep up with the world, how we do our daily business, to how we reveal and gain information, social network, play a big or small part in different phases of life.

Along the rapid growth of social networking sites in last decade, most of people have been familiar with Facebook or MySpace. According to the statistics released by Technology Review in January 2011, Facebook’s market has been growing at more than 200% rate last year in different countries like South Korea, Romania, Hungary, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, India, Portugal, Costa Rica…ect. Despite of some of significant drawbacks of using Facebook like privacy and security, it will most likely remain one of widest acceptable platform. Microblog –Twitter, the 2^nd biggest social media with 95,8000,000 members (ebizmba.com February 2011), enables users send and read messages on the go. Thanks to the most popular video-sharing media, people can upload, share and discover videos for different purposes, entertaining, educational or business… and so on. Many people subscribe publications with RSS reader or News Aggregator software to stay up-to-date based on personal interests. With RSS feeds, the news or information will come to us, it can be time saving and trustworthy since we know who or what organization is recommending the fed content.

I haven’t heard any of social bookmarking sites. Bookmarks is one of features my use a lot on my laptop. It truly saves my time for repeated information navigation. The downside is the booked sites are not able to be shared within different devices or even different browsers. Now people can store bookmarks, add tags of their choices, and designate the saved the bookmarks as public or private through a registered social bookmarking site. The article, 7 things you should know about social bookmarking (EDUCASE Learning Initiative, May 2005), addressed social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures and allow like-mined individuals to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources. Social bookmarking is also a useful tool to promote website traffic by tagging or sharing the sites among the cyber community. The downside of social bookmarking is there is no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged and the resource might never be found by others with different logics of bookmarking and tagging.

While working with preschoolers, I haven’t had too many chances integrating social media into teaching. I use YouTube most in classroom to show some videos related the topics of thematic units. For example, we collect a series of video on the topic – bears we are learning this week and present them in a flash, entertaining way, so videos can help draw their attention and enhance learning experience. The video embedding feature of YouTube is a greatly helpful element for educators. Teachers are able to embed the videos on any site to share with colleagues, parents and community members to promote the communication and collaboration.

In age of Web 2.0., the possibilities of social media can be endless. Implement different media for different groups of learners, the learning results could vary significantly. As an educator, knowing yourself, understanding your students and getting familiar with your tools, at least, you are heading the right way along the technology revolution.