Tour de Blog #1

Make the rounds to some of the blogs with me. Read interesting posts. Say hi! Let people know you were there.

• Jasper offers some thoughts about starting a blog. Now that you're a few weeks in, do you have any more ideas to add in the comments?
• Calling all Swifties! Lydia's focusing on Taylor Swift communities, and I just know some of you will have some thoughts to share on that.
• Over at Echoes of a Higher Ed student we have a fine reflection on the many different types of online communities we join. Go share the ones you belong to.
• Lurk if you like. Rose shares how it's a legitimate practice.
• And Jack lurks a lot, although sometimes posts as well.
• Most importantly, as MJW notes, we can use online platforms to support both formal and informal learning. And many other activities ...
• Aastha shares how she met her spouse online -- and I think many of us can relate these days. I sure can!
• Over at Ctrl+Alt+Learn there's a great post on platforms and demographics.  I keep saying that Facebook is for old people and poking fun at myself -- so go chime in over there. And then go visit our resident Facebook Grandpa.
• And another older platform ... Twitter, now X. We're not officially over there, but India's talking about it. Do y'all want to use X together?
• In her daily brew, Zhongyu's embracing the personal in her online learning environment. 
• Adam also has a great reflection on his PLE.
• At From Scrolling to Learning there's some reflection on how ... well, how teens aren't just scrolling but are learning. And a question about the role that teachers might play.
• And what do middle schoolers think about it all?
• Felipe points out that there's a lot of learning happening outside of school in the social media realm, including content creation.
• And yet people are also online watching each other play games, right, Greg?
• But game platforms are not just for gamers, right HB?
• Aya's not debating online .... but others are, and she's reading it.
• Gatsby's doing his own version of a tour de blog -- love it! See if you got a shout-out over there.

Now head on out and leave some comments for folks!

Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge

Need something fun to do this weekend? 

Beat the heat by being cool: Do the Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge.

By the way, this is an actual activity you could modify for your own
class -- just think of course-relevant items for students to find or document, whether online or in the real world.

We have two versions (because I'm extra and I like to encourage choice):

1. Social Media Challenge

2. Long, Hot Weekend Challenge

Play along with one or both. The directions are the same. The two lists are below.

Badges

Badges are available if you're interested. To earn a badge, you must complete ALL items from a single challenge list. If you don't want a badge or just want to do some of the photos, that's fine as well.

Complete one? Earn the Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge badge.

Complete both? Earn the Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge Superstar badge.

What to do:

1. Make sure you have an Instagram account that is set to public. Use the one you have already (if you have one) or create a new one. Instagram allows multiple accounts, and you can link them to the same app, which is super convenient.

2. Go about your regular weekend activities and see how many items in the scavenger hunt list you encounter. Take photos of each item you encounter. NOTE: DO NOT TAKE UNNECESSARY RISKS. BE CREATIVE!

3. Share your items on Instagram! Use the hashtag #eme6414 so we can find your photos. You can share them individually as you find them (and if you do, please add captions for each one) or you can wait and upload them all at once as a multiple photo post (you can upload 10 at once; it's a good idea if you don't want to fill your regular Instagram feed with all of these photos). If it's not obvious which item you're trying to share, definitely use a caption or edit the photo and include some text or at least the photo number from the list below.

4. Collect and submit the receipts: Write a blog post about your Instagram Scavenger Hunt Experience. Bonus points if you can figure out how to embed your Instagram posts into your blog post.

The challenge will officially end at 9 pm Sunday June 1, Tallahassee time. 

We'll announce our winner(s) here on the blog on Monday or Tuesday (give us a little time to sort this out). The winners will also receive digital badges. I know ... exciting, right?

Be creative! Stay safe! If your plan was to stay at home, stay at home and find these items around the house and/or online.

SOCIAL MEDIA SCAVENGER HUNT CHALLENGE

What to find:

1. Business card with social media contact info
2. Book with social media contact info for authors
3. QR code that leads to a social media channel
4. Social media from a celeb or citizen incorporated into a major media outlet news story
5. A business (restaurants, retail, etc.) that prominently displays its social media channels
6. A hashtag appearing on TV
7. A public space where social media is being used to promote access to educational materials
8. A place where you think social media should be involved, but isn't (e.g., a missed opportunity)
9. An overt encouragement to post to social media from/about a specific location.
10. An unexpected social media channel (e.g., “I can’t believe NASCAR is pushing SnapChat!”)

BONUS: An innovative use of social media seen in a physical environment

LONG HOT WEEKEND CHALLENGE

Some of these items are vague. Enjoy interpreting them through photographs!

Have a full weekend, as best you can. Try to work in all of the essential elements. If you so desire, you can do it without ever leaving home. In fact, some of the best submissions for this challenge were done during the height of stay-at-home orders in pandemic summer #1.

1. Sports

2. Nature

3. The arts
4. A concert
5. The movies
6. Fine dining
7. A barbecue
8. Relaxing
9. Hanging out with friends
10. Big night out

BONUS: Post a challenge photo to the rest of us using #eme6414 (create a visual with your challenge and post it)

Thinking about online community

 How do online communities intersect with one's day?

This is a question I set out to answer for myself yesterday, exploring a day in the life and then also considering what didn't happen during that day that might happen on other days.

Before I get into it, I want to talk about what a community is (and isn't). The baseline definition is that it's a group of people who share something -- interests, geography, values, experiences. There's always something uniting a community. If the shared thing is too broad, general, or vague, it's difficult to perceive community. Marketing companies have tried to create brand communities, for example, but I feel no particular kinship with others who eat Siggi Skyr. I breathe air, but so does everyone else. We're not community. ISLT feels like community to me. Just this week I got a message from an advisee who just graduated, who met one of my advisees who graduated a decade ago. They're collaborating! The ISLT community helped facilitate that.

Narrowing to online community, it can be a space where people belonging to a community in the physical realm congregate, or it can be an entirely online group -- people who've never met.

Here we go, day in the life:

• Bleary morning Facebook check. Two communities of note:
• My "Fake Internet friends" - a group of women I met online in 2002. We've traveled across platforms together. We're about 250-strong. Some of us have met in real life (I think I've met 4-5 of them). I feel like I know many of them, and their families. Our group is a private one. There's a Monday check-in and I reviewed it on Tuesday morning.
• Gardening group - it's a local online group. I don't know these folks, but we share geography (or should I say growing region, weather, and nurseries?)
• At the desk:
• 9-11, my online writing group. We're all FSU-affiliated, we meet on Zoom, we co-write and commune. These are sort of pop-up groups, and this one will last at least for this summer. We already seem to have some in-jokes.
• Slack - checked in to see if my research group folks had anything to share. It connects us when we are apart.
• Taking a break:
• Back on Facebook (I'm old ...). I'm in local groups (geographic community) but largely ignore them. Still a useful source of info from people I'll probably pass on the street but never meet. I also see a message from a subgroup of my Fake Internet friends (those of us who talk about our teens and the road to college)
• A high school friend has created a new group focused on wellness and has invited various of us into it. I finally clicked accept on the invitation. Why not?
• Professional groups:
• Checked in on a proprietary tool space for a group I belong to. I don't know everyone, just a smaller cohort, but we share a bond. I like to see what people are posting, and specifically I was looking for some book recommendations.
• Checked on a group space for another professional group, just seeing if there were updates.
• Checking email:
• It occurred to me that two listservs that have been active lately are online communities. I checked out some calls for papers shared on one, and on the other there was a conversation going on about ethics. People say listservs are dead, and I know the tech is old, but it's an easy way to keep a group that shares a professional interest connected. The opt-in nature of these lists and the groups they represent makes them quite different from employee email groups I'm a part of.
• Nextdoor. Sigh. Train wreck, I know, but I get email notifications and I just can't stay away. It's neighborhood-based and city-based and for the most part I don't know these people (although you get familiar with the names of habitual posters). I can't say that I feel like it's community, but at the same time it claims to be?
• Got an email from my neighborhood group. Folks are rallying to protest changes to city zoning. I don't really know that many folks who are active in the neighborhood group, although I know most of the people on my block and recognize others (yay, walking the dog). I see that there was a post in the neighborhood Facebook group, too. It's weird ... we all interact more there than anywhere else.

That's it. In about 16 hours, those were my online community interactions. I didn't really post, just read. I will post in the Fake Internet friends group on Thursday (another check-in of sorts). I'll probably be in slack, and I'll meet with the writing group. Else, I'm feeling pretty lurky right now in terms of my online communities. (Not counting classes, which are temporary communities.)

I think I have less energy for the groups because of how much energy I have to devote to email. I really want to do more with one of those professional groups, but being an active member takes time.

The Social Butterfly Challenge

  

A challenge! Earn a badge!

This challenge is deceptively easy. For some of you, it may be really easy, but many of us are kind of shy at heart (hi! that's me!). Still, we also tend to like a little interaction as well as recognition for our work.  Every performer needs an audience, right?

With that in mind, let's practice being social butterflies.

WHAT TO DO:

To earn this badge you must:

1. Comment on at least 3 different peer blogs (the class blog doesn't count) that you have not yet commented on previously.
2. Engage with people in two other spaces (Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube ... even X if you're a user), whether people from this class or elsewhere.
3. Write a blog post on your blog that refers to and links to those same three blog posts and embeds, links to, or otherwise provides the receipts for the interactions on other platforms (without violating privacy -- be attentive to public vs private spaces). 
• Weave your evidence into your narrative on that post or tell us why we want to check out these posts or accounts.

BADGE AWARDING

Vanessa and Shiyao will be monitoring blogs for the posts. Help us out -- title the post "Social Butterfly Challenge" or otherwise indicate that you're doing the challenge at the top of your post.

NEED HELP EMBEDDING?

On a lot of social media platforms, if you click on the "..." menu one of the options will be to embed a post, and you'll get a bit of code you can drop into your blog, Canvas, or wherever else strikes your fancy. 

Challenges and Badges in EME6414

  Week 3 is almost here, and that’s when we will begin challenges and badges.

To get a full sense of what we’re doing, I encourage you to review the Zoom recording (it’s only about 15 minutes long, you can watch it at 1.5 speed if you like) and learn more about what will be happening. 

You can find it under the Zoom link in the Canvas sidebar menu [look for Cloud Recordings] and I put the link in the Module 2 file list, too.

The brief version is:

Entirely optional and just for fun, I’ll be issuing “challenges” here on the blog. I’ll announce them on Instagram, too, but the full details will appear on the blog. You can complete the challenge if you want, and if you do you’ll receive a digital badge. The challenges vary, but are designed to give you things to try out using different platforms. Engaging in challenges and earning badges will count toward participation in the course. Again: you do you, but I look forward to seeing some of you play along.

And until we actually begin the real challenges, here’s an informal one. Consider it a soft challenge (like a soft opening of a business):

If you do the challenge, leave a comment here so we know to go look for it.

When you start noticing ...

 ... it's everywhere.

For example, blogs are past their prime, and yet they set the stage for so much of what we see online today and they still pop up everywhere.

Today I got an email from our local coffee shop, Lucky Goat, saying I should check out their new blog.

Now, clearly it's not 100% new because there are posts from the last little bit. But then again, they are trying to generate some attention and traffic while providing some coffee education.

See for yourself: https://luckygoatcoffee.com/blogs/news

What blogs have you noticed lately?

Who are we?

 Just thought I'd share a bit of data from the survey you all completed last week.

What tools do you use?

No surprise here that Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are topping the list. Still, consider our numbers: We are 19. We have one non-user (at least in the moment last week) and also a few folks who don't use these big 3. 

Looking at the other end, we have no Bluesky users (perhaps because it is new? To be honest, I just cranked it up for this class), and just a few blog, Threads, and Snapchat users.

These numbers are dynamic. I know there are not only never-users among the uncounted but also former users. 

For me, in the non-EME6414 moments I would say that I use: Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Blogs. And others not named there. Maybe sometimes Pinterest? Does it count that my kid shows me TikToks? I have used Twitter, but stepped back from it when accounts, algorithms, and other stuff started to change.

I also know I should have LinkedIn on the survey. Why didn't I? Not sure, really. 

What concepts are familiar to us?

Memes! And no surprises there. 

Many of the concepts that folks considered unfamiliar may actually be known in your brains but not labeled as such. And ... well, we're going to learn about all of this stuff along the way.

So what are your thoughts? Any surprises here?

Trivia: The things you learn online

 So, when I was a teen a really big thing was the game Trivial Pursuit. How to win? Answer lots of questions across different categories. You could make teams (so this is sort of like how bar trivia games work, I think) and pool strengths. The main point seemed to be showing off how much knowledge you had about things that didn’t seem to really matter in any other corner of your life. Trivia. Otherwise unimportant knowledge.

Back in those days, you picked up trivia in school, from reading magazines and newspapers, maybe watching your TV. You remembered random things your Great Uncle Al would say. It added up.

Now I pick up trivial knowledge online, through incidental encounters. 

Today I share with you a random thing I saw this week. A point of curiosity. Yes, on Facebook (because I’m old) I learned about the Callin’ Oates hotline set up by Hall and Oates fans. You call, you can request to have a song played. Here is an NPR story about it from 2011. 

How delightfully random and trivial! And how bizarre that people are still running a hotline like this in the 2020s, when most people would just go to Spotify to hear a song.

Slightly more useful information I learned the same way this week: Planting citrus near oaks is a good idea. 

What trivial things have you learned online this week?

The Choose Your Own Adventure Course

We're only one day into this course, and hopefully you're starting to see that this is a choose-your-own experience course.

 

Do you remember choose your own adventure books? Where you got to make decisions about what would happen next?

You are in a dark hallway. The only light is seeping through the crack of what may be a door at the end of the hall. You walk down the long, dark hallway toward the light. When you near the end of the hall, you pass a narrow table with a phone on it. Just as you reach the door at the end, you see an envelope on the floor. The envelope is halfway under the door. The phone begins to ring. You:
a. Answer the phone
b. Pick up the envelope
c. Open the door

I loved those books! The idea that I had a choice and could be immersed in the storytelling was so much fun.

I feel like this course is a similar experience. It's not entirely scripted, but it's also not entirely unscripted. You can be your own protagonist here. I'm going to use this post to highlight some of the choices you have and explain why (pedagogically speaking) I'm giving you this choice.

Welcome to EME6414, Summer 2025 Edition

Hey there! Hooray! You made it! 

We've been waiting for you since last August, when the 2024 edition of EME6414 ended.

This is the blog I will be using to share links and small tidbits of interest throughout the course, as well as to provide some links to and highlight content from your blogs (sort of a "best of"). Through the sidebar, there will also be links to various class-related tools.

Your TA and I will be posting to this blog, and we encourage your comments and conversation.

Just a reminder -- if you don't want your name appearing online in this context, don't use your name. You may write your blog under a nom de plume, choose a Twitter pseudonym, and so on. I will link to your blog and refer to you in this space using whatever online name you choose. I just need to know for assessment purposes that "Mary Smith" is posting as "Wonder Woman."

Catch the wave and let the wild Internet ride begin!