Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge

Need something fun to do over a hot summer weekend? 

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! Mention the challenge in your captions. 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. Embed your Instagram posts into your blog post.

The challenge will officially end at 11:59 pm Sunday, 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 video from a regular person incorporated into an official 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 #1 An innovative use of social media seen in a physical environment

BONUS #2 A scenario in which a social media channel OTHER THAN Insta, Snap, X/Twitter, TikTok, Youtube or Facebook is being promoted

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. People are creative!

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

Reddit Challenge

Reddit can be overwhelming. There's a lot going on there, and how do you make sense of it? A challenge is a great way to have a bit of structure as you explore Reddit.

Part 1: Finding Spaces

• Find a subreddit related to your academic or professional interests
• Find a subreddit related to a personal hobby
• Find a subreddit that surprises you (something you didn’t expect exists)
• Find a subreddit with very strict rules
• Find a subreddit with very minimal rules

Part 2: Deep Dive on a Subreddit

• Identify one rule that shapes what can be posted in a specific subreddit
• Find an example of a post that follows the rules well
• Find an example of a post that breaks the rules (or gets called out)

Part 3: Understanding What Gets Attention

• Find a highly upvoted post and describe why it might be popular
• Find a post with very few upvotes and reflect on why
• Compare “Hot” vs. “New” in one subreddit

Part 4: Light Participation

(low-risk—no pressure to go big)

• Upvote or downvote at least 5 posts. How did you choose? How did it feel?
• Leave one thoughtful comment
• Reply to another commenter

Part 5: Platform Awareness (Bonus Round)

• Figure out what karma is and how it works
• Notice how anonymity affects how people communicate
  
  

If you want to earn the badge, write it all up, with receipts (e.g., screenshots) and post to your blog. Title the post "Reddit Challenge"

Coming Friday: Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge!

Get ready to take and post some photos for the Instagram photo scavenger hunt this weekend. Details will be posted here at 5 pm Friday and if you do the challenge, it culminates in a blog post with your various Instagram finds embedded no later than 11:59 pm Sunday.

Who's in?

 

Tour de Blog #1

 Have you been checking out the blogs? So much good stuff going on! Take a look at the summary below (maybe you're in it? if not, maybe next time?), visit some blogs, and leave some commenty goodness!

• Dami tell us how he found his people as he prepared for graduate school far from home.
• JNSU26 offers up an insightful perspective on this whole digital native movement, touching on what it all really means and SHOULD mean for teaching / learning. 
• Maria tells us about her shift to the online teaching world.
• Web 2.0 Learning Lab shares an amusing story of realizing that the kids she taught clearly grew up with different tech. 
• Jellyfish took a deep dive and found the Memex, connecting it to currrent ... well ... connections!
• Blake brings us back to the wayback of Myspace. Who else was friends with Myspace Tom?
• Manouche reflects on how technology keeps changing and changing our lives.
• MnLV no longer feels like a digital toddler (I was chuckling at that phrasing) and has RSS up and running. Now go say hi on that blog!
• From N(ash)ville With Love shares a contemporary view on networked creators, exploring how things have changed since Rainie and Wellman's Networked was published.
• Brownie Bee is reflecting on how she has experienced communities online, but maybe not really focused on the intentionality of it all.
• KGabbing, inspired by the Asuncion (2026) article, did an AI-enhanced exploration of toxicity and gaming communities.
• Small Potato is thinking about Reddit (did SP know we were headed to Reddit this week?) and wants to know about your experiences and favorite subreddits.
• We missed Prof Stein's birthday ... but it's not too late to go leave a happy birthday comment and read some musings on hashtags (which are dead, or not really dead, but just not as useful for aggregation as they once were. Oh, but that post ends with performative hashtags).

RSS: Brought down by the algorithm but still alive

 

I make no secret of the fact that I really like RSS. It is not that I dislike algorithms. They have their place. But there are things I want to follow closely, and I do not want to miss a beat.

Let me take you back to the summer of 2004: 

I was a new faculty member, living in a new town, and most of my friends were scattered across other cities and countries. The internet was how I stayed connected to people and ideas. While spending time online, I found blogs. Not celebrity blogs or corporate content, but blogs written by people like me. 

As I started following more and more bloggers, I discovered RSS. At the time, I used a reader called Bloglines. It aggregated all of my favorite blogs into one place. I loved that I could add new blogs as I found them and then simply check one site to see what had been updated. It was so much better than clicking from blog to blog, hoping something new had been posted. Soon I realized I could subscribe to more than blogs. News outlets offered topic-specific feeds, so I could follow only the areas I cared about. Journals had feeds that notified me when new articles were published. RSS became an easy, efficient way to track people, topics, and publications across the web. It felt organized and intentional. I controlled what I saw.

At some point, the big companies caught on. Google launched its own RSS reader, folded it into its ecosystem alongside Blogger, and bought out competitors. This is a familiar story. For a while, it worked beautifully. And then Google Reader was shut down.

The explanation was that people no longer used it. That was not entirely true. But by then, something else had taken over.

Algorithmic feeds.

Platforms like Facebook shifted away from simple, chronological content. If you were an early Facebook user, you might remember how different it felt. Posts appeared slowly. You primarily saw updates from people you actually knew. Now the feed is fast, dense, and filled with content chosen for you based on your past engagement.

Those algorithms are designed to keep us scrolling. The more time we spend on the platform, the more profitable it becomes. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. But it also means we are no longer just seeing what we chose to follow. If we were limited to posts from people and organizations we explicitly subscribed to, many of us would encounter far less content. And perhaps we would spend less time there.

Some people have stepped away from these platforms for exactly that reason. Even for those of us who remain, something about that earlier experience is still appealing. I miss the clarity of RSS. I miss opening a feed and knowing that what I saw was exactly what I had asked to see.

I would go back to that in a heartbeat.

That said, RSS is not dead. It quietly thrives in places like podcasting. When you subscribe to a podcast, you are using RSS. You expect to be notified when a new episode drops. You are not looking for a random algorithmic suggestion to start with episode 35 of something you have never heard before. You want your content in order, from the sources you choose. So RSS is still here. We just don't talk about it much anymore. And we no longer have the same level of awareness or easy access to RSS-style aggregation across our everyday online experiences.

Maybe that is what I miss most: the sense of control I had when RSS was Queen.

Challenges and Badges

 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): Share a photo that depicts something that you've learned recently. Maybe you work it into a blog post, maybe you post to Instagram. 

If you do the soft challenge, leave a comment here (what did you post, where did you post it) so we know to go look for it.

Who are we?

Just in case you were curious, or maybe thought you were the only one who had never used a particular platform or maybe the only one who didn't know a concept ... Mmmm. You have company. Plus you're here to learn.

Here's an overview of the class from our intro survey.

Any surprises? Or is this about what you would have thought?