An EMErging Blogger

Phew! We've made it to the end of the 6-week semester of EME6414! What an interesting semester it has been, and I think Dr. Dennen has done a great job of equating it to 'trying to drink from a fire hose'  because that's exactly what it's felt like! However, it did become more manageable as the semester progressed because I stopped trying to do EVERYTHING and just started doing the things that caught my interest. I think that's a great life-lesson for social media too. Everyone wants to know what apps are out there so they can stay in the loop. FOMO is a real thing, folks! I think it's impossible to have 100 apps on your phone and give each equal attention. It's like what Rainie & Wellman talk about in Networked - you could have 1,000 people in your network, but it's impossible to keep up with more than about 150 of them. And then, it's hard to have more than about 10-15 in your innermost friend circle. I think social media works the same w

Have you ever wanted to survey a group of people and just ended up asking for "a show of hands?" How effective was it? Did you count them all and then write down the numbers? What about if you ask a question to the group. Do you go down the rows, writing down each person's response? You might do the first, but it's probably unlikely that you'd do the second. But what happens when you really need that data? Do you send out a survey and hope to get responses? This is exactly why I love to use PollEverywhere . You can poll a group in real time quickly and easily....and anonymously. This means nobody has to feel embarrassed about their answer or worried that the others will judge them. All you need is an internet connection, which means it can be done on a computer or mobile device. Instructors create the questions beforehand and then share the unique code with the group. The group goes in and submits their answers and a few seconds later they pop up on the instruct

We've talked about context collapse before in EME6414, but after reading this week's articles, I thought I'd share my own thoughts about using Facebook for class. Dr. Dennen's article " Identity, context collapse, and Facebook use in higher education: Putting presence and privacy at odds " included some results that surprised me. I did not expect so many students to be comfortable with using Facebook for school purposes. We are not using Facebook in EME6414 and I appreciate that, because I know how tempting it can be to "Facebook stalk" classmates, professors, and professional colleagues. I have no problem becoming Facebook friends with classmates that I actually do become friends with, and even have a couple former professors on mine, but not until after I had taken their courses and/or graduated. A lot of respondents on the survey said that they have used Facebook to vent about courses, post about procrastination, and share what they're c

Have you ever received an email that went to hundreds of people and suddenly people are replying all over the place and it just.... won't.....stop???? That happened to me today. In fact, it may have happened to you too! It appears I am part of some giant listserv for the FSU career center. Someone emailed the listserv asking for resume help, and suddenly there were 72 emails in my inbox within 10 minutes.  Holy Cow Sure enough, about half of them were "Stop hitting reply all!" A couple people didn't realize it was a listserv and were genuinely trying to be helpful, and the rest..... they just had fun with it. Suddenly people were joking about dropping a new hit album, sharing their Instagram, talking about hitting up the Tallahassee clubs, and making plans for breakfast.  And then.... someone decided to "take it offline" and create a GroupMe. I've actually never heard of this before... is this what all the cool kids are using these day