Week 4- Social Media

Social media is a powerful part of our society. It is used for entertainment and networking. People have even built careers off of their work on social media sites. One new emerging use is to use social media for instruction opportunties.

 While this is a very different type of instruction than has been covered before, I believe there are many uses for social media in instruction.

Twitter is a quick response system with a comment limit of 140 characters. Information is tracked using hashtags (#). All responses for a particular hashtag may not appear in every search, which can be frustrating. The character limit can also limit discussion opportunities, but there is a popular work around for that issue. In the case of a comment exceeding 140 characters it is common to start the comment with a fracton, such as 1/2. The following comment(s) will then continue up to the denominator number, 2/2.

The best use for Twitter is most likely in alerting people about instruction opportunities. A search for instructional design on Twitter today, 5/1/15, brings up many links to instructional design articles and information.

 

A better choice for discussion and responsive instruction may be a forum system, such as Reddit. Reddit separates forum by overall topic, such as history, then into searchable subtopics. Each subtopic builds its own discussion. Discussion points can be voted either up or down to help move helpful or meaningful comments to the top of the screen to aid in reading. You can also reply to a comment and the reply will be listed below the original comment but indented.