Poll Time!
I asked the following questions in my social media poll:
1) What social media sites do you use on a regular basis?
2 )How often do you visit social media sites?
3) What social media site do you use most often? Why?
4) Do you have a personal blog?
-What site hosts your blog?
-Why do you have a blog? What do you blog about?
5) In what ways do you use social media?
6) Do you have any other comments on your social media use as a whole?
Here is a handy summary provided by Google, complete with snazzy charts.
A total of 13 people took this, all of them UF undergrads. I advertised for this poll - interestingly enough - through Facebook. I placed the link in my status and repeatedly refreshed it until today, when I closed the poll.
The Biggie/Tupac debate aside, what I immediately took away from this poll was the complete and total domination of Facebook on the social media scene. Of the thirteen participants, every single one of them reported using Facebook at least once a day, and all of the participants cited Facebook as the site that they used the most frequently. Only one participant reported using another site (Twitter) purely for recreation, while one more student reported using a blog site, but for a class assignment.
Another interesting thing was that not one of the participants had a personal blog. As previously stated, one student reported having a blog for school, and another reported that he or she was considering on starting their own blog, but had not yet done so.
More than half of the participants reported using some form of social media for school, which indicates an interesting trend on the behalf of the teaching strategies used by UF professors.
The question that I found the most interesting however was my final one - an open ended question on whether or not the participants had any further comments on their social media usage. Several participants had a variation of the same response - that they feel that they rely on or use social media too much - almost as if it were an addiction. One even goes so far as to call it a disease.
Wiki Links
http://wikisineducation.wetpaint.com/
This site, sponsored by wetpaint, shows how educators can set up and begin to use a wiki in their classroom. It has examples of wikis that have already been set up and are in use by other educators, and also provides tips from them on how to incorporate them into the classroom.
http://itcboisestate.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/10-best-practices-for-using-wikis-in-education/
This is a non-sponsored blog entry by Barbara Schroeder, a Clinical Associate Professor for the Department of Educational Technology at Boise State University. This is a less bubbly, more practical look at using wikis in a classroom environment and actually goes into the stumbling blocks associated with using wikis as a tool and/or resource. She lists ten tips for integrating wikis into the curriculum while keeping in mind the possible problems that both educators and students might encounter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pR5yogCmkA&feature=related
This is a video that both interviews a teacher who has designed her entire course around a wiki and shows students using the wiki and gauges their reactions to it. This video was especially interesting to me because the teacher being interviewed was actually an English teacher, which is my area of concentration. I was therefore able to see first-hand (so to speak) how a wiki might be used in a manner that I could personally imitate.
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