Instagram Scavenger Hunt Challenge

Need something fun to do this loooong hot 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! 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 11:59 pm Sunday June 2, 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. Tweets or a YouTube video incorporated into a 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, 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.

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)

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, X/Twitter, LinkedIn), 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 the interactions on other platforms. 
• 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 Jae 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 Twitter or Linked In?

Look for the three dots on the top right of a post and click on them.

Then you'll get a menu like this. Look for the option to embed and follow along from there to get your embed code.

Take the code and go into HTML mode in your blogger window. This is the trickiest part. Drop in the code where you want the tweet to show up, and then head back to compose view.

The embedded tweet will look like this:

Hey there #eme6414 ... it's time for the social butterfly challenge. Details on blog. pic.twitter.com/Trz2daJj7H

— Vanessa Dennen (@vdennen) May 28, 2024

How about Instagram? Well ... it doesn't always work, but it does sometimes. I have luck on a browser but not the mobile app. Here's info on embedding an Instagram post. 

I challenge myself: LinkedIn

 LinkedIn. I've been on the platform for a long time, but if I'm honest I don't really use it.

My woefully neglected LinkedIn profile.

In the early days, it was mostly perceived as a place for posting your online resume and being found by employers. People "endorsed" each other and shared jobs within their network.

I was on there for two reasons. First, I wanted to see what this platform was all about. Second, it was a way to interact with our ISLT alumni. For me personally, it wasn't going to be valuable for job seeking or hiring because the academic job market just doesn't work like that. It occurred to me that it could be valuable for consulting, but I really don't have a lot of bandwidth for that and consulting gigs of appropriate (read: minimal) scope tend to find me at opportune times (e.g., breaks).

Over time, the platform has changed. It incorporated groups, and I started to spend a little more time there with our alumni group. And then it added posts and a feed, and reactions. Scrolling through LinkedIn is not unlike going through a Facebook feed, minus the distinctly non-professional content. And I like to keep my Facebook personal and my LinkedIn professional, so having a feed for each life context makes sense.

Recently, for a whole host of reasons that I won't get into within this post (but I'm happy to share -- and no, I'm not changing jobs or anything like that), I've been thinking that I should get more engaged on LinkedIn. By more engaged, I mean regularly posting on there when I have things to share and having a presence. That also means reacting to others' posts (which I typically do when I log in; logging in is usually driven by a notification that I have a pending connection request or new message). 

I'm not entirely comfortable. What do I have to post? I guess I can post about my presentations, publications, and other accomplishments. I see people who post all the time about these things on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But that's just not me. I figure people who are interested will just find that stuff, no need for me to share it. However, professionally I keep getting told that I need to share these things. I guess I should? I know I should? And by doing that I maintain my network connections and awareness which means I'll have them to tap into under other circumstances (e.g., when I'm sharing a call for contributors or want to share an opportunity).

That leads me to today.

I told myself I would challenge myself during EME6414, when I have all of you to interact with. 

Here we are. EME6414. Week 3. LinkedIn is a tool this week. We have a group for our class. And here I go ... started with a post this morning.

What are you going to challenge yourself to do? (Or are you waiting for my challenges?)

Tour de Blog #1

 Have you been reading the blogs? If not, you should! There's so much great stuff being posted.

Here are some posts I recommend checking out:

• Making Meaning reflects on using technology with students and tech challenges that they have faced in the last two weeks. I think we can all relate.
• Along those lines, Lotta has struggled to get Instagram running, but has been successful on X. So will some of you be on X? Just in case, I went ahead and posted on there:

It's summer, and that means it is time to teach #eme6414 again. Now that the blue bird has been X-ed out, I'm not sure my students will want to be here, but just in case, here I am. Say hi #eme6414 folks if you're over here.

— Vanessa Dennen (@vdennen) May 27, 2024

• I have to admit that I've not watched Bridgerton, but I know many of you have. Kenia has some thoughts about how some of that social scene might have played in the land of blogs.
• As we drift into thinking about communities, you might want to read how SMT encountered and came to feel connected with The Bucket List Family.
• Saul pushes us to think a little bit about whether or not YouTube is really social media. 
• Kaley asks about your experience being mobile. When did you first get a phone?
• Are those digital natives really so tech savvy and always online? The Grad Lab pushes back. And where are my teachers at? Please go check out what they have to say about it:
• Idam was surprised when her students searched YouTube rather than Google.
• Wile E. Coyote had to check some assumptions.
• Micah suggests that digital natives exist on a spectrum.
• Jen H is a digital native whose digital native students are different from her.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check out these blogs and while you're there leave a comment!

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 on. 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.

X-ing out Twitter?

Yeah, yeah, I know … I just say the word “twitter” and some of y’all shudder. And I get it.

Even in the best of times, the platform was misunderstood by many who heard the worst about it and didn’t have a chance to see the best of it. The best of it wasn’t for everyone, although I hoped people in this class would come to at least understand what good the platform brought to some folks.

But now, it’s changed. I don’t just mean the name (and what kind of a name is X? It feels so meaningless, although doesn’t allow for some witty comments about how changing its name to X was a means of canceling itself).

This year I had a choice to make: Twitter? Or X it out?

I decided to not use it (unless some of you want to use it, in which case you should let me know). My main reasons were the changes that the platform has undergone in recent times, changes that go beyond ownership and name.

I want to share about my reasons because I like to make my choices transparent to students. In this discipline, courses and educational choices serve as models. They warrant discussion.

Let me tell you about how we used Twitter in previous years. I tweeted using the course hashtag, #eme6414. Students could tweet, or not. I would interact with whoever tweeted with me, and I would post notices about things going on in the course, like challenges and badges. It wasn’t an issue for students who didn’t tweet because (a) I’d replicate the same info elsewhere and (b) they could passively follow along on Twitter without an account (two options: there was a widget in the blog sidebar that would list the most recent tweets to #eme6414 and link through to the Twitter page that aggregated those tweets, or they could go to the Twitter web page that aggregated those tweets.

Here’s what a past EME6414 student might encounter:

However, the platform has really closed down. In 2023, the settings changed. It is no longer possible to really search through and watch things play out on Twitter without an account. Musk said that’s because data scraping was causing the service to “degrade.” Whether that is true or not, the end result is a less useful platform for EME6414 purposes. 

It’s a pity, because Twitter made it easy to interact quickly with others. In contrast to Instagram, graphics weren’t required and people could easily share links and have short-message exchanges on there. Plus it worked equally well on a phone or in a browser. 

I’m saddened by these changes. I really didn’t use Twitter much the other 9 months of the year (occasionally while at a conference), but always enjoyed the EME6414 interactions each summer.

If you want to use Twitter, please comment on this post and I’ll get things up and running. And if not … well, I’ve been exploring other options that seem more palatable. They’re different, for sure, but different isn’t necessarily bad.

Grading participation

 I love grading the participation logs in this class. Not only do they give me an opportunity to connect, however briefly, with each of you (and sometimes we dialogue a little bit in that space), but they also give me a chance to see all of the different approaches and connections people make with the class.

During week 1, in addition to the discussion board (the NEW Canvas discussion board --- what do you all think of that?), you've been interacting on blogs (thank you! y'all are probably the fastest to do that of any class I've taught), testing out different tools (already!), doing some extra reading and research, finding resources for your own contexts and diving down various rabbit holes.

Just wanted to let you all know how fabulous it is, and I'm looking forward to learning all about your Week 2 adventures.

A choose your own adventure course

We're only a few days 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.

1. TOOLS

You get to choose which tools you will use, and which you won't use. I'm going to cover a lot of tools, and I'll set up play spaces and challenges for us in many of them. I also welcome suggestions for tools you may want to try that weren't on my original plan. I will never make you use a tool other than Canvas (a university expectation) and blogging (you choose the platform!).

Pedagogically, I feel strongly about having choice in this area. Forcing tools on students rarely goes well. Many of you are in this class with your own personal goals or agendas. I'd rather let you focus on the tools that interest you most rather than spread your time thin across many tools. You're also all at different levels in terms of comfort and prior experience. For some people, trying one new tool per week will be a good stretch. For others, three a week may be a better pace. It really doesn't matter. The tools are simply a means to an end. Also, if we blog about our tool experiences, we can learn vicariously through each other. And many of the tools allow you to just follow if you want a less direct/vivid experience. Case in point: If you never set up a Twitter account, you can still follow along via the tweets in our sidebar.

2. PEOPLE

You get to choose who you interact with. There are 25 other people here with whom you can interact. You can be a social butterfly, or hang with a few buddies (and I hope you won't relegate yourself to playing the wallflower). You're also not limited to this class. There's also a whole world out there, and if your goal in this class is to learn how to productively connect with ... I don't know who. Water buffalo breeders? Pastry chefs? Ultramarathoners? ... then you should be making those connections. I'll show you how, and you can go do it (and count it as participation). Pedagogically, I feel that it's important that I value and encourage your connections with people outside the class. If all you did was interact within the confines of our class community and you were limited to learning about interacting with others, you would be missing the opportunity to explore networks and then debrief them with the class.

3. PRIVACY

Will you be a John or Jane Doe? Or are you building your personal brand on the web, screaming your name from every mountaintop? Either is fine. Will you blog about your innermost thoughts (about social media, of course!) or provide impersonal reviews of tools? Totally up to you. Pedagogically, my goal is for you all to learn how to participate in social media learning environments and to learn how to help others do the same. I want you to see the full range of examples in this class, and by showing you all some of your privacy options and encouraging you to engage in discourse about it when you feel uncertain, I'm trying to model for you how the issue can be approached and demonstrate that there are many ways to participate with varying levels of privacy -- and none is the "best" or most correct way.

4. COMFORT ZONES

Everyone has one, and everyone's is different. I'm going to encourage you all to try things that are a bit out of yours, but I won't tell you what that should be. Pedagogically, risk-taking is a good thing, but it can easily go wrong. A forced risk that doesn't go well can hurt a learner's motivation, creating distrust and ill feelings in the class context. I don't want that! However, when people take small steps out of their comfort zones and feel at least somewhat in control of those steps, they're likely to succeed!

So, what is your adventure going to be? What do you choose? That's something for you to think about as we start to round out the first week (and continue to think about and discuss throughout the entire course). I can't wait to see the "books" you all write for yourselves over the next 12 weeks.

blown away by the network silence

 Friday morning, 6:51 am.

The phone alert goes off. 

My husband, quite tired, says "oh, its a thunderstorm warning" and closes his eyes again. NO. It's a tornado warning. We bolt out of bed, grab our teen, and head to the basement. OK, fine, we also grab computers, iPads, and wallets and I think my husband takes the dog out quickly (which makes no sense; he says he heard a huge boom as he shut the side door but didn't look back to see what it was).

We sit on the couches in the basement, stunned and trying to wake up (except for the teen; she realizes that she is going to be late for school and will miss her FAST test). The weather gets worse and the power flickers. I try to remember how to check the weather, who would be updating the info. Boom. Power gone. I tether to my phone and find the weather guy streaming on Facebook. In that moment, he is my hero. 

After what feels like forever, the storm passes. We head upstairs. The yard has acquired a giant pine branch, maybe 30 feet long. Half of our fence is gone. Debris everywhere. But we are okay.

I try to get some info. Was there a tornado? Are people injured? What's going on?

Twitter! (I still can't bring myself to call it X) Haven't been on there in forever, but it's a great place to get info about events as they unfold. I see some early photos. I read about power outages. I head to Facebook where people are starting to post in big local groups (nothing from my local friends yet). I go to Instagram, where (as expected) I see nothing about a tornado. And then my phone stops working.

It just stops working. I can't get a signal. I cant text, get email or look on social media. I feel silenced and distanced from the world. At some point, we head out and drive around. The idea is we'll get some coffee and at some point well pick up a signal. We drive toward FSU. Nothing. Around FSU. Nothing (but I see the blown away circus tent and a huge mess all around the stadium area). We are in public, but our lives are more isolated than usual.

We find ourselves on the other side of town, on Capital Circle NE. I use the wifi at Publix to text family and tell them we are okay. At Starbucks, our phones finally get signals again. We sit in the car in a stupor, again scrolling social media to find out what's going on. After a few minutes we head home, and lose the signal again.

We are without network service for several hours. How weird! I'm used to being without power in the aftermath of a storm, but we have a generator and a ton of huge charging bricks. I'm not used to being without the Internet. I'm not used to not being able to search for info about what's going on. I'm not used to spending a day with no text messages.

It's not bad, it's just different ... isolating.  And very quiet.

My four big takeaways:

• When something is happening in the world, I believe I should be able to find info about it online, swiftly.
• Much as I don't like Twitter these days, its affordances make it a great tool for finding info on an event as it unfolds.
• Facebook can be useful for bringing together a local community after an event.
• Instagram is fun and interesting, but just not where it's at when events are unfolding.

If you were in the tornado, what was your networked experience?

Welcome to EME6414, 2024 Edition

Hey there! Hooray! You made it! 

We've been waiting for you since last August, when the 2023 edition ended.

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

Your TA Jae 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!