Social media – The scary, the awesome, and the scary awesome

I attended the Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium held on October 24^th at Metro State University in Denver and wanted to share a little bit about a social media session that I attended called “Social Media – The scary, the awesome, and the scary awesome.”

Why did I choose to attend the social media session? I have to admit that I am not particularly devoted to social media and often wonder when the buzz of twitter will die down. I think to myself, what possible use or service could all of these different social media sites provide that makes them so relevant in today’s society? Someone must get it because, Facebook has something like a quarter of the world’s population enrolled on its site. That’s no small feat. So, I chose to attend the session on social media out of curiosity and to see how social media might be able to enhance the learning environment.

The presenter started by quizzing the audience to see if they could recognize the various social media site logos. I realized that there are many more social media sites than I had initially thought and some sites I had never identified as social media. The sites include: Flickr, Instagram, Blogger, WordPress, Good Reads, Pinterest (a personal favorite), Tumblr, Wikipedia, You Tube, Vimeo, Stack Exchange, Reddit, Octocat, and GitHub.

Some sites are great for photo sharing, others are good for discussion, while even others encourage group engagement. This is the key to social media in the learning environment I discovered, no one site is right for all circumstances. The presenter emphasized creativity in the incorporation of social media. Good reads for example is a site where anyone can go to post their review of a book and to comment on other’s reviews. This could be added onto a reading assignment or incorporated into a class discussion.

While the presenter didn't have time to go into the benefits of each site, we only had twenty-five minutes, he did leave us with curiosity. He pressed us to explore more social media sites and to think more abstractly about how they could be used in our day to day lives and in courses.