Social Media Technologies and Relationships

Social media seems to be taking over and the technologies and tools offered are endless. This week we are exploring some new tools including Google Maps, Edmodo, Fakebook, Symbaloo, and Webquests. It is so neat to see all the different tools offered and what you can do with them. While social media has a plethora of benefits, have you ever considered its downfalls? Do you think social media is interfering with your relationships?

Marissa Brown wrote an interesting article on the topic. She believes that social media sites have disrupted our micro, interpersonal levels within relationships. Do you agree?

Image Credit: Yoel Ben-Avraham

Learning on Twitter Chat

I decided I would try another new tool this week! I was very inactive with my Twitter account prior to this course; merely a lurker on the very random occasion someone told me to check out something they tweeted. So after getting back in the groove of tweeting for this course and following my classmates tweets, I was ready to try out a twitter chat!

#lrnchat uses a social messaging service, Twitter, to conduct an online chat. They hold chats once a week from 8:30 - 9:30 pm. Participants are typically those who are interested in learning in formal, informal, social, and mobile ways. It was so exciting and I was fully engaged in Twitter and the participants for that hour! 

It was so neat to generate so much traffic to my twitter account while learning from people all over. A few of my classmates were involved as well and I even had a conversation on the side with one of them and a few #lrnchat participants too!

My Twitter notifications were on overload and it was challenging to keep up! (Good thing it was only an hour!) Here is a recap of my notifications and involvement in my first #lrnchat:

• I gained 5 new followers!!
• Had 19 of my tweets and tweets I was mentioned in favorited!
• Was directly tweeted at from 4 different classmates!
• Was retweeted by 3 lrnchat participants
• Had direct conversations with 5 people
• Was welcomed by 2 lrnchat participants
• And I was added to 2 lists!

Overall, it was a ton of fun and I learned something new!

If you're interested in reading more, check out the full transcript from last night's Learning Quotes discussion !

https://lrnchat.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/transcript-july-16-2015-learning-quotes/

Would you be interested in participating next week? 
Let me know what you think(: 

Perspectives

As I begin to curate resources for my Knowledge Sharing and Tracking assignment, it got me thinking a lot about perspectives. Everyone has different perspectives, or ways of seeing and thinking about things. I hope I can retain followers with similar perspectives, although having different perspectives is beneficial to see the whole picture. Have you stood in someone else's shoes before? Understood where they come from and why they carry certain perspectives? Have you benefited from someone else's perspective? Definitely something to think about.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Dawn Ellner

Interested in Folksomies?

Web 2.0 offers a plethora of tools, as we dive into more and get further into this course, are you using these tools? Or are these tools overwhelming you? 

I have begun to organize my online life and these tools are definitely helping me. Finding the time to learn and use everything might is the challenge I am trying to overcome. I want to start using tags more since I believe they can be beneficial in finding things, rather than me just booking everything I am interested in. Tags will help me find what I am looking for more quickly and organize my online collections. I don't want to clutter my new online world, otherwise I will definitely overwhelm myself. I found this blog useful and I wanted to share it with my readers. It offers useful tips and further readings on tagging and folksomies if that sparks an interest of yours! 

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1206

Let me know what you think!

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Howe, is a process that involves outsourcing task to a distributed group of people, typically online and targeted at the public, is becoming a growing topic and tool for companies. (Howe, 2006). Although it is a new topic to me, I think I have been participating in it on the lower level, as a consumer, all along. By my use of social media tools and online product reviews I feel as if I could have contributed to companies online marketing crowdsourcing on the base level.

Over the past four years, this topic has grown immensely. It is amazing to see how large organizations use crowdsourcing to gain competitive advantages in their industries.

An article that I found extremely interesting is 6 COOL CROWDSOURCING BUSINESS TOOLS. 

One of the points it touches on is on-demand transcription. This is a service that is growing and being used more and more. The article talks about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is also covered in our course reading Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk by Mason and Suri (2011). Mason and Suri touch on some of the aspects of using the web for behavioral research and the benefits including easier access to a larger diversified pool and lower costs of experimentation. Time is a huge advantage of these tools as well. CastingWords, an on-demand transcription service, uses Mechanical Turk to pay people to transcribe segments of audio with a turn around time of 24 hours. It’s amazing what can be done, for less pay, and less time, using the web. 

Although this may seem like sunshine and rainbows, there are always disadvantages to process as well. One of the fallbacks of crowdsourcing I noticed is the quality of work you are receiving and the accountability of the people doing the work for you.

I am interested to hear what other limitations do you notice, or have experienced with crowdsourcing?

References:

Mason, W and Suri, S. (2011). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2011.

Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine, 14, 1–4.

6 Cool Crowdsourcing Business Tools. (n.d.) Retrieved July 14, 2015, from http://www.inc.com/ss/how-use-crowdsourcing-business.

Gaining an Audience

As we near the end of Week 2, I have indulged in a lot of material. One of the articles that really stood out to me was Vanessa's "Becoming a blogger: Trajectories, norms, and activities in a community of practice" (Dennin 2014). I have begun to seek support in my online communities and the article touches on different factors of that. Having a place to go to interact with similar people and share my experiences is something I never thought I would do online. It is a neat experience though!

The article mentions that newcomers might have trouble getting started or gaining an audience. Some bloggers choose to observe, comment and then blog as shown in Case 2 in the article. That could better help them develop a plan and follow through with it.

As far as my communities go, I did not experience any resistance getting started. I was welcomed by multiple members and jumped right into discussion. My blog, on the other hand, I worry about gaining an audience still. I have tried to use tips from class to ask people for their opinions and provide questions so they can answer but I have not seen much activity yet. It is only week 2, so hoping with my increased comments on other peoples blogs I will soon see some reciprocity!

I am starting to think a pseudonym would have encouraged me to share my blog posts through Web 2.0 tools. Does anyone else feel that way?

Personal Learning Networks

I really enjoyed the PLN Videos and especially liked how the video stated there is no wrong way to create your PLN! I think I needed to hear that. I was worrying too much about which tools to use and how many and the thought of it was overwhelming but hearing I can create it my way to fit my needs really encourages me to not get overwhelmed and to use the tools I enjoy. I’m excited to continue learning about Web 2.0 but will choose carefully which tools I enjoy most, fit my needs, and make my life more efficient.

I am excited to build my network! One of my “to-dos” items on my phone actually is to go through and delete any old contacts, even old pictures. Although I update my phone to the “cloud” (which don’t even get me started about the “cloud”, that could be a blog of it’s own!!), I am really bad at removing old pictures because I love going back to them and finding them instantly. Working on that goal! So, once I build my network, I will make a cleanup per say every so often to remove things I no longer find useful and are just cluttering my PLN. That way I can keep it small and focused and not allow myself to get overwhelmed, since this is something to help me by following, participating and sharing knowledge.

By using all these different tools to help build my personal network I can tailor it to fit all my interests, preferences and needs to better myself at the end of the day. I am so glad I am learning about this, because although I use the Internet often, and did use have a few social networking tools prior to this course, I didn’t know I could control and build my personal learning networks.

After hearing about all the features and activities, I think I might’ve had a personal learning network all along without realizing it. Now it’s time to start taking advantages of these learning opportunities to tailor the perfect PLN for me! I do have some problems to solve and lots of goals to meet so I think this is really going to help me. Speaking of goals, another one of mine is to follow the news more often, I’m sure I can achieve that goal if I create and use my PLN right!

Thanks to this course, I’ve already met some of my needs and I am gaining a lot of knowledge. Through my community, my blog, my feed reader, I really am off to a great start! Time to keep building my PLN and contributing to my network!

Happy Networking (: