Many moons ago (my freshmen year of college) discovered Tumblr. It was filled with cool people that I could discover easily by clicking through tags, with a user-friendly and attractive interface. It was not as “professional network-y” as I thought Facebook was, or as “trying way to hard” as Myspace had become. It was, and still is my favorite social networking site. Anyway, after my success with integrating Twitter into our classroom discussion I decided to do the same with Tumblr. This is the link to the blog [click]. I thought we’d design a site and discuss their work here. I failed, hence the title. But I think I understand why now:
- I assumed the technology/digital media I found interesting was the same as my students.
- I didn’t ask my students what technology/digital media they found interesting.
- I didn’t sell the benefits of using a shared blog space in our ENC 1101 class very well (in retrospect I should’ve shown them this blog).
- Many other things that still culminate into total failure.
Those were my shortcomings. I’d hoped that they would discover interesting blogs while perusing the tags, and maybe we could’ve created an interesting shared space. I thought it would be a great opportunity to have a anonymous digital format to offer critiques of everyone’s work. But, I was wrong. So here are the things I’m going to do try next semester:
- Find out which social media applications my students like the best and figure out a way to merge them into our in-class discussion(s).
- I won’t assume that they’ll like it just because I do. By it, I mean anything.
- I won’t get discouraged just because an activity isn’t as engaging as I had hoped it would be.
Did ya’ll try anything with social media? How’d it go?