My Social Bookmarking

Reading everyone's posts about social bookmarking got me thinking: what sorts of social bookmarking do I do? I remember actively decided to bookmark fewer things in my younger years. I decided to only bookmark sites that I would want to return to. Outside of EME6414, I thought I had not been doing much bookmarking at all, but it occured to me that I have been doing it for years without realizing it.

I have confession: I am a habitual YouTube playlist maker. I love being the guy who knows about interesting YouTube videos that I can share with others. I am currently subscribed to over 700 YouTube channels, so I encounter a wide variety of videos that would be great to share with my friends and family, so I make YouTube playlists to remember which videos to show each person. I have over 500 videos in my "show wife" private playlist.

I am also a consumer of social bookmarks on reddit. Reddit uses "subreddits" as individual boards. In an expanded sense of tagging, subreddits serve as tags for content. I can check subreddits about things I am interested in and see relevant links shared by others. I most enjoy reading the comments from other users.

It is also worth noting that I actively try to limit my reddit usage. I have no reddit apps on my phone and I primarily just lurk. I get sucked into endlessly scrolling through reddittoo easy and earning "karma" is addictive. The reddit community can also be toxic and pedantic, so I choose not to engage deeply. Occasionally browsing the front page and a few subreddits that I frequent are enough for me.

A New Frontier

Welcome to my blog. I'm Bruce, one of your TA's.

From past experience, I can say that #EME6414 can feel overwhelming, especially in the beginning. There are so many new tools and new theories to learn about in a short time. After diving into the course, it gets more manageable. The deep immersion into Web 2.0 worked for me. Many of the lessons I learned from this class stuck with me well beyond graduation.

I am excited about being the TA for this course. The principles of Web 2.0 have stayed the same, but I am looking forward to learning the new tools that came out since I took this course in 2016.

Skinner Box and Social Media

Extra Credits is a great YouTube channel that explains many concepts with regards to video game design. In this episode, they explain different kinds of engagements with video games, but I think this equally applies to social media and instructional design. 

The video has two main sections. First, they they start by explaining how Skinner found that animals respond best to variable ratio reinforcement. They gave this example: Which would you prefer? To play slot machines all day and finish with $100 or push a button in a factory all day and finish with $100? These kind of Skinner-box engagements are common in games, but they can be over-used.

Social media is another great example of variable-ratio reinforcement. I post with the hope that each post will get a big response from readers. Sometimes I get it, other times nothing happens. I also check for Facebook updates WAY too often, hoping I will see something really interesting. Most of the time I don't, but sometimes I hit big!

The second half explains Skinner-box alternatives. Rather than just give you a leveling progression, they suggested the following types of engagement to replace it:

• Mystery
• Mastery
• Mental Challenge
• Narrative
• Novelty
• Flow

My personal theory is that we can engage learners in learning materials in similar ways that games do. You don't have to make something a video game, but if you can understand how games are engaging, you can make instruction engaging.

Suggestion For Improvement on Blackboard Forums

Blackboard is far from the worst LMS, but while reading a post, something came to me. Discussions online are supposed to help foster a sense of community and foster discussion. If Blackboard were to allow students to tag each other in posts, this would go a long way towards building that sense of community and fostering discussion.

In the short term, Blackboard does have a search function. I often search for my name in forums to see if anyone has mentioned me or replied to one of my comments. I always make sure to respond if someone mentions me by name. If there were a way to tag classmates and be notified of being tagged, I think it would be good.

My Blog Stats Reflection

This is my first blog post that I have ever continuously kept. I am always curious about metrics, so I have been following my page stats. It is always interesting to see which posts get popular and which ones remain obscure. Here are my top 10 posts of all-time by page views:

The #1 post is actually a bit of a surprise to me. It really didn't seem like an especially good or inspired post. It was pretty short and shared a link. I think it was popular just because it was my second post and I set up my blog earlier than many of the other students in class.

The #2 post is probably the post I am most proud of. I think I found a meme that perfectly encapsulated what I was trying to say. It took me a long time to write that post and to make it say what I wanted, but I was really happy with it.

I had 3 #3 posts.

One was just about Reddit. I wanted to sum up some ideas I had about reddit. I am happy with the discussions it generated. This post had the most comments of any of my posts. It had more than double its closest post.

My OERCommons post actually had a few people from Twitter read it. It has a small audience outside of our class. The OERCommons official Twitter feed responded to me about it.

My Goodreads post got more views than I expected it to have. It only had one comment, but it tied for the third most views.

I really liked doing these blogs. Reflection is really important for learning, especially online. I still have a few more posts to go!

Reddit's Moderation Tools

For my Produsage Assignment, I set up a subreddit about Korean Language Learning for Kids. /r/KoreanForKids. In doing so, I got to see some of the Reddit tools for moderators. I will show them below. They are not extremely user-friendly, but they do provide good tools if you know what you're doing.

Not Logged in

Logged in as Moderator

For each post, you can "

share

save

hide

delete

spam

remove

approve

lock

nsfw

." This gives you the option of removing any posts or even locking them so they can't be edited. 

Through the "Moderation Tools" listed on the right, I can set all sorts of different rules for the subreddit. I can set how long an account must be active before posting. I can designate monitors. I can set a style sheet to change the way things are displayed. I can lay out options for giving users "flair" that shows by their login when they post. Here are some examples:

The traffic stats are also particularly interesting:

Reddit also has "auto moderator." It seems pretty useful for bigger subreddits, but not worth my time to learn yet while the subreddit is so small.

Within each post, I can delete individual comments. I can also "sticky" them. This puts them to the top and of the page so users see it first. I did this for a few of my posts when I was trying to seed some discussions.

Periscope and Facebook Live - What is so special?

I unfortunately wasn't able to make the first Periscope meeting. I was really interested in going, but I couldn't find the official chat time that was decided until after it was posted. I did enjoy watching the recording thought. This time, I am really excited about getting to join from the comfort of my living room in Korea.

In preparation, I did practice using Periscope today. I scanned through a number of random channels. I was curious who might be streaming live from Korea. For some reason, it was all Russian people streaming from Korea in the mid-afternoon. I would feel self-conscious just talking into a cell phone with no one on the other end. Doing the VoiceThread was awkward at first, but at least I could rerecord it until I was satisfied with it.

Though I have little experience with Periscope, I have been inundated with Facebook Live notifications. I have watched a couple for a few minutes in passing, but on average, they tend to be pretty boring. I prefer edited clips. They have all the wrinkles ironed out and they're edited down to the most interesting parts.

I was curious why Facebook seems to be pushing this live thing. I did a quick search in Google to find out why Facebook is pushing Facebook Live so much. This opinion article on Mashable seems to share the same concerns about live videos that I have and expects them to go away.