Social Media Learning Activities

Doing this week's reading and looking into my main question about using social media for specific learning activities, it appears this is a very fraught place.  It appears that there are some interesting and significant advantages to doing this in class, and if not done in a very controlled and specific manner, there are also a whole lot of net negatives for both students and instructors alike.  I came into my first few weeks of THIS class worried about the blurring of lines in my already segmented and separate online and offline personas.  I have the same worries about this from an instructional standpoint.  And I'm still really struggling to see a positive way to do this.  Initially, I was mostly concerned with the idea that once you send students online to a social media site, Pandora's box is opened, and they are out doing their thing on TikTok and Instagram, and are less focused on academic pursuits.  It also feels like a bit of a drag to co-opt their personal leisure spaces for academic pursuits, but I get the desire to capitalize on their motivation to be on those sites as a driver for learning.  I do see the value in the specialized shared editing platforms--like adding sentences to stories or choose your adventure collaborations, but I'd have to do some work to see how I could, for instance, embed that into a high school English class, given all the already overwhelming curriculum standards.  If someone has a good example for how they do this, I'd love to hear it.  

And I can see the value of using specialized tools, as above, but sending the student to specific FB groups, or using Instagram for assignments (vs. the badge activities in this class), worries me greatly.  At this moment, I'm not convinced the benefits outweigh the negatives, or that I could facilitate and control in such a way that I could mitigate the negatives.  I'm happy to hear the experience of others that might downplay my worry!  It also seems like a LOT of effort on the part of the instructors with potentially small benefit.

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