Instagram Days of the Week Challenge (Ultimate Challenge Week 3)

Heads up!

For Week 3 of the Ultimate Challenge, we'll do the Instagram Days of the Week Challenge.

This challenge is designed to stretch your Instagram knowledge and skills a little bit. If you want to participate and don't want it to appear in your regular account, create a new account! Easy enough.

Remember, tag things with #eme6414 so we see it. Also save evidence of your contributions to share at the end. Oh, and Instagram offers help if you need it: https://help.instagram.com/  

TechMotivation Monday

#motivationmonday is a thing, but let's motivate people with technology. Share a post that motivates people to use a specific technology or to use it better.

Hashtags: #eme6414 #TechMotivationMonday

TechTransformation Tuesday

Choose your format (post / story / reel) and share how technology has transformed a part of life (your own or life in general).

Hashtags: #eme6414 #TechTransformationTuesday

TechWisdom Wednesday

Post a reel in which you share some form of technology wisdom (interpret that as you will).

Hashtags: #eme6414 #TechWisdomWednesday

TechResearch Thursday 

Create and share an infographic (as simple or complex as you like) with interesting internet research summarized. Be sure to include attribution to the study! 

Hashtags: #eme6414 #TechResearchThursday

FindOut Friday

Post a poll (you do this via stories, in the stickers) that asks some sort of technology or social media related question.

Hashtags: #eme6414 #FindOutFriday

Saturday Stories

Post a story or multi-image post that sums up your challenge contributions

Hashtags: #eme6414 #SaturdayStories

SumItUp Sunday

No need to post to Instagram this day. Write a blog post that reviews your daily Instagram activities for the challenge and your new insights on the medium.

Random Fun // Wikipedia

 Today on LinkedIn I saw someone post (brag, really) about their new Wikipedia entry. I thought "hmmmm" and checked it out. I was surprised to see that they had a Wikipedia entry. I know enough about Wikipedia to know that you can't create your own entry, but you can suggest it to Wikipedia editors and see if you can get them to undertake it. I also know that you need to have a certain level of accomplishment in your field. (My father-in-law has a Wikipedia entry)

Somehow that got me to wondering what my Wikipedia entry might look like if I had one. I asked ChatGPT to create one for me. It's not entirely correct, but it's nice to see that ChatGPT thinks I have enough notoriety as a scholar to warrant a Wikipedia entry. 

If you want to see it, look below the fold.

I earned a badge, should I share it?

 Badges are all around once you start looking for them. 

Some of us don’t notice, or don’t care. Often that’s me. I know what I accomplished and I’ve no idea what I’ll do with the badge. Sometimes I get in a MOOD and want to be silly with such things, like the time I saved up paper “certificates of attendance” from a number of conferences and hung them up in my office. I thought that was funny (I have received them at international conferences, and it seems to be important to some attendees as proof to their institution that they were there).

I’m flying home from a conference today, a conference where I gave a talk. I noted that I received a digital badge through the conference platform (Whova … and that’s a whole post I could write)

Here it is! Should I share it elsewhere? Should I post it to my LinkedIn and see what happens? I mean, the platform provided tools to share it to socials — that’s the whole point, right?

 I typically present a at 5-7 conferences a year, so at this point it doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. I list it on my CV, and move onward. It’s just another requirement of my job. I might have found it special the first time or tow.

But I actually have a bigger question for y’all. Please feel free to weigh in here.

This time last year I embarked on a journey to become a leadership and performance coach. There are many whys for doing so, and I’m happy to share, but most importantly let me state that I am not leaving my job at FSU and switching careers.

I worked hard for my Level 1 certification, which I earned in March. I’m now working toward ACC level certification (need to get about 25 more coaching hours for that — I can coach students as part of my job at FSU and count the hours, so feel free to HMU if you want to try it).

Anyway, I got a badge and digital certificate when I completed my Level 1. I’m also really proud of my accomplishment. To me, this is much more meaningful than celebrating another conference talk.

When I finished Level 1 and got the badge, it was a super hectic time. I told myself I would update my web site for coaching and then share the badge on LinkedIn. I’ve not done that yet. Is it too late? Is it silly of me to even think about sharing this? Or should I go ahead and do it? 

Who knows, I may be in this dilemma again in a few months, after I get my hours, take my test, and get ACC certified.

And yeah, the badge is from Brown University, which amuses me because my husband did his undergrad there. I like to joke that now we’re a Brown family. :)

Social Media Fiction Challenge (I did it, too!)

 I read a YA book for the social media fiction challenge. 

Should I award myself a badge?

I chose The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler [on Goodreads]

This book was about a teenage girl who had just received a computer .. and her friend next door, who brought over an AOL CD-ROM. Yup, it’s set in the early 1990s, and the main characters use dialup to log in to AOL. How does this relate to social media? Well, through AOL they find a secret portal to a ‘website” called Facebook that shows them the future. Like, 15 years into the future. And they are confused (is it a scam? A virus? Is someone pranking them?). Over the course of a week they check in on their future selves, gleaning details of their adult lives through posts, relationship status, friend lists, etc. And when they don’t like what they see, they start to realize that they can make small changes in the present that affect what they see of the future on Facebook. They know they shouldn’t, but they can’t help themselves. I’ll stop short of giving spoilers, and just say that it’s an interesting view of how we provide information on Facebook.

Great fiction it isn’t. But it’s an easy and charming read.

Tech struggles are REAL

One of your classmates noted in a participation log that tech struggles are real.

I am here to confirm to you all: Yes, yes they are!

If I may break through the fourth wall (or maybe better in this case to say “pull back the curtain”) and share some of my process in this class … well, the tech struggles are REAL.

I’d like to think that I’m good with tech. I was using computers in the late 1980s, creating art, programming HyperCard stacks, etc. I was on email in 1991. I remember using FTP services to upload/download attachments, with fussy file naming conventions. I hand coded websites in html. All of that.

Still, the reality of my every day is that I’m not on Pinterest/Instagram/LinkedIn/X/every-other-platform daily, and even when I’m on the platforms I’m consuming more than anything else. New features come and go, the platforms themselves evolve quickly and are often unstable, and then each summer I get to this class and I have to set everything up again and figure it all out.

Folks: Tech struggles are REAL.

If by some miracle I’ve made it look easy, well … can I get a badge for that? Because each week I’m setting up tools again, fussing with features that allow people to join groups, clearing out old posts, setting up demos. And the tools are always changing, sometimes dying, sometimes being born. I miss Twitter’s good ol’ days, and I posted updates there a lot. It was a great hub! But no one wants to be there since the algorithms changes and a lot of the content took a turn for the more toxic. LinkedIn has really upped its game, but it’s a real-name professional platform, so we don’t want to use it in that way. Instagram just doesn’t work in that same way, even though it offers hashtags. Each week it’s a mess of setting up, testing out, copying over, etc. And I struggle.

That’s all. I just wanted to validate the struggle for everyone. If you’ve had moments of “why won’t this embed/upload/link/whatever” … we’ve al been there.

The Ultimate Challenge - Week 2!

Alas, we are in Week 2 of THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE!

This week, we have a new set of challenges going on. Do as many or as few as you like. You don't have to do Challenge 1 on Day 1 -- it's entirely up to you how (or if) you approach the challenges. 

Here's a list of challenges for the week. Full details below the fold.

1. Digital detox
2. Exquisite corpse story [Easter egg]
3. Create your own story
4. License yourself 
5. Hashtag Ethnography 
6. Collaborative concept map [Team challenge]
7. Blog makeover

Virtual Vacation Challenge

 

Ultimate Challenge Days 5-7

It's the weekend, so it's a good time for the virtual vacation challenge.

Take yourself on a virtual vacation this weekend. Find a lovely spot (real or fictional) and imagine how you would spend a day there. Look up photos online and write a blog post about your day with the photos integrated.

This may not feel like much of a challenge, but here's the challenge part that relates to our class:

Include at least 4 photos that you've found online that include Creative Commons licenses that would allow you to share on your blog, and share them with proper attribution. 

How do you find these photos?  Flickr. Wikimedia Commons. Lots of places!

There's no absolute perfect way to give attribution, but here are photos I took this week and then shared on Flickr:

"Helsinki" by vpd6414
is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

"Conference Badge - ISLS" by vpd6414
is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

I used the Flickr embed feature to grab the embed code (I had the header/footer included), dropped it into the blog post in HTML view, and then added a caption underneath to provide complete attribution.