Distance Learning, mLearning, Digital Education, Technology

These days, it seems my students can’t let a minute go by without checking TikTok and Instagram or responding to their friend’s latest post on Snapchat. Teens’ widespread access to smartphones for …

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)

"

Anxiety about the effects of social media on young people has risen to such an extreme that giving children smartphones is sometimes equated to handing them a gram of cocaine. The reality is much less alarming.

 

A close look at social media use shows that most young texters and Instagrammers are fine. Heavy use can lead to problems, but many early studies and news headlines have overstated dangers and omitted context.

 

Researchers are now examining these diverging viewpoints, looking for nuance and developing better methods for measuring whether social media and related technologies have any meaningful impact on mental health."
Via John Evans

When we say that our lifestyle has changed, it tends to point towards various trends and things that have brought that difference.

According to this research, by January 2019, there have been 3.4 billion active social media users around the world. Even young children, who are barely beginning to speak, want a piece of it while they are eating - they won’t open their mouth unless their favorite song is played on YouTube!

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Technology has undeniably and profoundly expanded access to education in many ways. For one thing, classroom walls have dissolved in the wake of these advancements providing new ways of learning. With classroom social media, a new age of education is dawning and teachers can be a catalyst for educational change.

The use of classroom social media allows students to communicate and collaborate with other students studying or researching the same topic or lesson material. With this freedom, students tend to take more responsibility for their own learning.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

As many educators are either on their summer break or about to enter it, I know many are looking for great books to read.  This is great, but as we hope for our students, consumption should not be the only focus, but creation as well.  If you are looking to read, how will you connect the information you consume and dig deeper?

For this, blogging is a great tool not only to synthesize your learning but to also catalog it into a type of library.  Going through the process of writing “The Innovator’s Mindset” and finishing my second book, my blog was invaluable in finding great information from others that I had placed into my blog that I could reshare in a book.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Time spent on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook probably isn't driving teenagers to depression, a new study contends.

Via Dr. Pamela Rutledge

As the old saying goes “Every day’s a learning day’.  Social Media including Twitter seems to be always changing things. Whilst introducing new features in the main can be useful, they sometimes pass you by.  For me it was saving a draft of a Tweet. How did I miss that?! This post highlights some tips that I hope you will find useful. For keyboard shortcut fans there are a list of commands towards the end of the post.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Christopher Torres-Lugo, Kai-Cheng Yang, Filippo Menczer

A growing body of evidence points to critical vulnerabilities of social media, such as the emergence of partisan echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. We show that these vulnerabilities are amplified by abusive behaviors associated with so-called ''follow trains'' on Twitter, in which long lists of like-minded accounts are mentioned for others to follow. This leads to the formation of highly dense and hierarchical echo chambers. We present the first systematic analysis of U.S. political train networks, which involve many thousands of hyper-partisan accounts. These accounts engage in various suspicious behaviors, including some that violate platform policies: we find evidence of inauthentic automated accounts, artificial inflation of friends and followers, and abnormal content deletion. The networks are also responsible for amplifying toxic content from low-credibility and conspiratorial sources. Platforms may be reluctant to curb this kind of abuse for fear of being accused of political bias. As a result, the political echo chambers manufactured by follow trains grow denser and train accounts accumulate influence; even political leaders occasionally engage with them.

Via Complexity Digest

Advantages Of Social Media In Education

Social media and technology are vital pieces of day by day life and incorporating the utilization of these into the classroom is more normal than previously, given how adjusted numerous students are to them.

Every social media stage offers various approaches to be utilized in the classroom, from sharing declarations to holding live talks, thus considerably more.

It’s critical to comprehend the effect of social media in education before utilizing it, yet we’re of the firm conviction that it will help advance students in innovation.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Shubham Agarwal

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)

Via Digimaze Marketing

If you're one of the many people who doesn't like the new Twitter interface, I'm one of them, you don't have to use it in order to still enjoy connecting with others through Twitter. First, you can do what I did and switch to using Tweet Deck to view new Tweets, replies, mentions, and to post your own new Tweets. Tweet Deck lets you see Tweets separated into columns of mentions, hashtags, and lists that you've created in Twitter.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Gavin Phillips

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)

Twitter has long positioned itself as the “global town square” in which the world comes together to have a shared conversation across geographic and cultural boundaries. Such was the early vision of last decade's social platforms, that they would bring us together as a society and overcome the ability of elites to dictate the global conversation. Instead, even as Twitter’s CEO touted his company’s global reach in 2013, the platform’s growth had leveled off and over the half-decade since, Twitter has shrunk almost in half, shed its vaunted geotagged resolution, centralized around an ever-older set of elite accounts and transitioned from a place to hear from the world to a place to retweet from afar. What does this mean for the future of the global town square?

The great dream of social media was that it would give everyone a voice. From heads of state to ordinary citizens, everyone, no matter where they lived, what they looked like, what their background or place in society was, would be equal. Most importantly, these social platforms would be free to publish to and consume and would not preference the wealthy and powerful over the traditionally disenfranchised.

Elites would no longer control the global conversation. We would finally have our long-elusive vision of communicative democracy.

 

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

 

https://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-and-its-influence/?&tag=Twitter

 

Via Gust MEES

A new report from Global Web Index reveals the top social media sites and apps of this year.

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa)

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania found that limiting social media usage to 30 minutes per day can lead to improvements in well-being.

Via John Evans