So, this week is the final week of my online social media class. Given my mood, I decided today would be a good day to reflect upon it. Although in the beginning of the class I felt extremely overwhelmed by the amount of things we had to do, once I got more used to each form of social media and could navigate more quickly, everything began to flow.
I will say that the most beneficial tools I enjoyed and learned from the most were the wikispaces of blogs. I enjoyed these because I felt as though they were genuinely useful, interesting, and something that I would use in my future. Blogging was foreign to me, but it opened up new doors in regards to connecting on a deeper level with others and being able to read what they had to say in detail rather than in a "status". Wikispaces are just amazing in general. Being a girl who feels that I have spent my whole life in school, I am amazed that I hadn't heard of them for working on group projects before. They are so helpful and convenient, especially for online courses. The site was also so easy to learn, especially with the tutorial, that I feel anyone could learn to navigate it quickly. It also works really well in terms of grading for professors since the activity is always logged, which is something that can be good or bad, but it eliminates student frustration over who does what and trying to make sure other group members are participating. I enjoy the fact that anyone in the group can have access and make changes to the page on their own time.
If there is anything that I would eliminate from the course it would be the use of YouTube and Flickr. Although I understand the importance of being of aware of such social media tools, I felt it extremely difficult to connect with classmates and others and I found them to not be very useful throughout the class. I suppose my final opinion on them is that they play a very small role in social media and I thought other sites could've been more useful. I also had a very hard time creating channels in an organized manner on YouTube and finding outside source pictures that would actually load into Flickr.
On my phone, my most used applications that pertain to social media would have to be Wordswithfriends and Pinterest. I downloaded Wordswithfriends the second I got my phone. Although I go through stages of playing a lot to playing not at all, I enjoy it because it allows me to play a game of "scrabble", if you want to call it that, with my friends, family, or a complete stranger. You can play whenever you want and I find it rather amusing. As you have heard in the past, Pinterest is my weak spot and I downloaded it after months of trying not to. However, I think that Pinterest in really making a break through in terms of social media. It's connecting people on an interest-based level and it's sparking creativity in many of its users. Also, the interest-based part of it makes it different than Facebook and Twitter in that you can connect with people who enjoy the same things you do and feed off them, their likes, their Pins, etc.
Although there were some minor changes that I would make to the class, overall I feel I had a great experience with this class. It made me more knowledgeable on social media tools that I was previously unaware of and made me understand the positive role that being socially "web-active" can have in my life. Whether I want to stay in touch with friends, share pictures with my family, connect with my co-workers, or work on school projects, I now the many options of social media that allow me to do all of this in the click of a button.
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