Celebration of learning

In this course reflection, I will reflect how I met the course outcome

1. Examine the application of social media to support learning

I learned that different social media platforms lend themselves to different ways of supporting learning from my major project with my learning pod. Teachers can use Facebook to create discussion groups and polls, which may be a great way to communicate but not collaborate.GitHub is a good platform for collaboration because it allows group members to fork the course’s channel without affecting the content if they want to edit it on rmd. Users are allowed to add to or edit this page, and they can also see what others have contributed. Moreover, another EDCI course from the last semester offered me the opportunity to participate in a Twitterchat, and I discovered that Twitter is an excellent tool for forming PLNs, due to the hashtag function, which makes it easy for people to participate in larger conversations. #BlackLivesMatter, for instance. Using hashtags, people will be able to see how others respond to the topic, and then they can add their own thoughts.

I discussed in my week 5 post how the reading of “One without the Other: Stories of unity through diversity and inclusion” inspired me to rethink the concept of inclusion. Following the completion of the major project, I begin to realize social media platforms can support inclusion. The use of social media in the classroom provides teachers with the ability to respond immediately to students’ messages. This is an efficient means of communicating between teachers and students. Also, as students, we can create a personal learning environment since social media encourages self-directed learning. For example, in my Twitterchat activity, the instructor poses many open-ended questions, hence I need to search for my own answers, which requires a lot of research on my part.

2. Explain personalized learning and its relation to learning theory 

Personalized learning is a notion that teachers should avoid one size fits all appraoch, and adopt a student-oriented approach, modify the lesson activities base on students’ learning needs. In Siemens (2005)’s article I discovered that his learning theory promotes diversity and inclusivity in online learning environments. In my week 3’s post, I discussed how traditional classrooms tend to place students in a passive role; they receive information, interpret information, and apply that information to new situations. In an online learning environment, however, connectivism dissolves the distinction between teacher and student. Students contribute to the building of new knowledge by collaborating with each other, while the teacher guides them. Connectivism learning theory made personalized learning easier because this learning theory encourages teachers to ensure diversity opinions, students’ autonomous in learning, and collaberation. In someways, connectvism learning theory is similar to the Vygotsky’s ZPD learning theory in Alirezatahmasebi’s seventh post, these two learning theories are student-oriented learning learning, and they all suggest occurs in social interaction and right amount of teacher’s instruction.

3. Recognize that the internet is not a neutral or equal space for everyone

The Internet should be considered a venue where everyone has equal access, as well as the ability to exercise freedom of speech. However, not everyone has equal access to the Internet. As I explained in my post for week 8 the documentary Citizen Four ,I came to the conclusion that the government might control the messages being sent out by the media. Freedom of speech might not be as free as we might think. It has also been mentioned in Michelle’s week six post that we are still extremely vulnerable on the internet due to survillance capitalism.

Moreover, the internet could also be a place of suppression. Our project involved investigating Facebook’s moderation system, and I found that the company permits misinformation, abuse, and racial and sexist messages without moderation. Even though every person has access to social media, I still saw women being objectified and sexualized and minorities being marginalized, in other words, people belonging to socially at-risk groups in the offline world continue to be mistreated online.

4. Apply social media to develop a personal learning network in support of your personal and/or professional development 

In my second post, I explained how the reading “What are Personal Learning Networks” helps me understand how we as learners are able to take advantage of a network society. PLN involves an ongoing process of ‘perspective shifting’. We might be challenged with different ideas, but that challenge motivates us to explore what we can build on what we’ve already accomplished.

Discord was used as a platform for collaboration by our learning pod to complete the major project. Each week, we communicate in the discord channel about the wow and wonder post, how to edit on GitHub, and what parts of the course materials we don’t understand. My learning pod is a good example of a personal learning network; it supports my understanding of the course, and it also helps me on a professional level, for instance, my group member can explain things I don’t understand in the readings.

5. Identify privacy issues and practice online behaviors that are legal, safe, consensual, and ethical

Expanding on what I wrote in Week 6, I think it is very difficult to protect our privacy online because not all of us have the digital literacy to identify whether our privacy can be protected. For example, many websites will require us to submit our email addresses, but I notice that I get junk emails from platforms I never enter my email address. Moreover, in Leo’s Week 6’s post, Leo also noticed how everyday devices such as phones, retrieves more personal information than we think, and we don’t know how our personal information will be used. The bid data analysis may already have a profile of us, in order to sell us things and profit from us, and it seems that we have little resistence power.

6. Recognize data ownership and licensing (Creative Commons, Copyright, Fair dealing and public domain) as a core practice when creating, sharing, or using resources online 

In our major project, our group members agreed that as decent digital residents, we should make sure the materials we use are under the creative commons license, knowing the copyrights issue is important. Furthermore, we should not spread messages or information that don’t come from a valuable source or hasn’t been evaluated. We need to be responsible for what we express in the public domain, being in a public domain is already a privilege considering people who have no access to the internet. 

Having this in mind, when writing the major project, our learning pod is very careful with citing our resources, we include a citation link after every question we answered, even if we didn’t look at any additional resources, we make sure we add [This is a comment] at the end of our sentence.

As educators, Mia in her discussion of Gardoce (2021)’s reading has noted that teachers should also be aware of what online resources they can use and cannot use, even when the resource is a TikTok video. Many online videos have copy rights, which only allows viewers to watch but not repost or second use.

7. Practice digital, network, and open literacies in support of learning about social media and personalized learning. 

I learned “coding” through GitHub; I believe that this should count as digital literacy. In the beginning, I was very confused by Github. I have never used a platform like this before. When I first encountered it, I felt frustrated. Eventually, though, I think it will become worth it once I have mastered the language of using that platform. The pull request feature of this platform is one of the best features, it allows the team leader to see what each team member has contributed, and the leader decides whether to accept the change request. As a group leader in my past collaborations, I have been frustrated when I cannot see which group members have made changes, without informing other members of the changes.