Flight Path
Current Coordinates
My background with personalized learning is very limited, with my only introduction to the concept and applying it having been in other EDCI courses taken (335 and 337). I vaguely remember using social media in high school for the format of a few assignments, like Instagram and YouTube, since those were the most familiar to us as teenagers. Keeping this in mind, throughout this course I will be drawing from personal experiences of personalized learning and social media, specifically what has worked for me and what hasn’t.
Nevertheless, I am quite familiar with creating public-facing articles that need to take into consideration how the public will perceive and interact with the information provided. Taking human geography courses focused on community engagement and consultation has provided me with this experience.
Mapping the Route
Throughout my time in grade school, I had a very difficult time connecting with most of the material and assignments I was tasked with, which motivated me to take EDCI courses geared towards improving learning resources. I am hoping that this course will help continue to build my toolkit on how to successfully create accessible, ethical, and intentional work that will be put to good use wherever my professional life decides to take me!
Social media is incredibly influential to society today and has great capabilities to keep us connected and informed. I would really like to explore how social media is currently being used in formal education settings, since I haven’t used it that way for quite some time, other than keeping myself informed on what’s happening around the world. I’m quite curious about how social media sites can be used ethically in educational settings while being platforms that anybody can contribute to, in turn making the information presented much harder to control than a “typical” educational resource.
I wish to explore these topics and concepts to hopefully change the way I see social media for the better. My exposure to social media started when I created an Instagram account (without my parents’ permission) when I was only 8 years old (way back in 2012), when all I would see were clips from Vine and funny cat videos. I have grown up using social media as a tool to stay connected to the world around me through memes and candid pictures; for this reason, my stance on whether or not social media has a place in the world of education is quite biased. I’m looking forward to the alternative perspective this class will present, while I also shift towards a more professional approach to social media once I finish my undergraduate studies at the end of this year.
Anticipating Turbulence
Of the concepts we will be covering in this course, the one I’m most concerned about is licensing. It is a topic I am very unfamiliar with. Being a student, all licenses I’ve needed to access and publish on platforms have been provided for me, either by the prof or from the department itself. I’m grateful that I will get low-stakes exposure to the topic before entering the professional sphere, but I will need to pay close attention to the course content when the module comes.
If I encounter any hurdles or concepts that I cannot seem to grasp, I will navigate this by doing my own further research, as I’m sure there are many resources out there. Since this course attracts quite the interdisciplinary group of students, I could also reach out to peers that would be much more familiar with the legal sphere, like business or economics majors. This would be done through our Teams chat, specifically looking at everyone’s introduction, which included a bit about themselves and their background.