Reflection-My Twitter Network

 

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When I first reflected on myself as a novice tweeter, I was lacking on the contributions part of twitter. In fact, Twitter began been a one way street for me as I let information come to me. No more. Twitter is now a two way street as I grow confident in my digital voice. Considering where I was before, the snapshot of where I am currently at indicates I am becoming more active with my tweets (see image above). It used to be that I would just read posts of other’s thoughts, and comments. Once I began to get involved, I was astounded to see people interacting with me back! This motivated me to contribute more, such as sharing relevant links, forwarding new information about teaching Health and Fitness, as well as posing questions related to teaching.

Upon creating my twitter account, I immediately started following my broad interests. After a while I was simply consuming information from twitter, and I hated it. Not only that, I was feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of seemingly scattered information. Through the process of unfollowing people, I have found my information feed to be more lean of relevant information that is of use to me. Therefore, I have made a conscious decision to only use twitter intentionally. I wonder if there is a technical name for using social media in a specific way, to enhance the mind? Perhaps there are research question/study that focuses on this question in particular?

Throughout the process of compiling a list of 53 people that I am currently following, I have kept the different aspects of Health and Fitness in mind. The aspects of Health are mental/emotional, physical, and social. I have chosen to follow psychologists who specialize in mental health/wellness. Additionally, I am following the national Health and Fitness organization (SHAPE America), as well as other Health and Fitness instructors. It is refreshing to have new ideas on a daily basis, plus there are questions posed by them that I too wonder about. I have been surprised to see there are 14 people following me. Is it because of the course posts that they are following me? Perhaps it is the people I have selected to follow that has piqued their interest in following me? I wonder when specific people follow me, what is it about me that has them interested in my tweets? I may never know, unless I tweet at them of course.

HQ Fail #4- Twitter Hashtags!!

This week’s assignments seemed to go well enough. I worked through my weekly readings, tweeting about them. Once I completed my tweets, I turned my attention to tweeting within my networks. After taking a while to engage with people on twitter, I was done with this part of my daily assignments! A while later, I went back to my blog page to post several things. Out of the corner of my eye, I realized something was off in my twitter widget. I wondered to myself, “What’s missing?” My heart immediately sank. I realized I had neglected to include hashtags in my tweets!! “No way!!!” I thought. There must be an edit button that I can select to fix this. Nope. I realized I had to delete all of my tweets, and retype each tweet out individually. This was frustrating for me, since I had to first type out my tweets into a word document before deleting my original tweets. The next step was to type the tweet into my phone’s twitter app. At least two or three times, I posted revised tweets again without including the hashtag!! Trying not to think negatively, I deleted these tweets and typed them again, including the appropriate hashtags. Reflecting upon this, I realize why twitter does not include the option to modify tweets. Anyone would be able to lie their way out of original posts, and tweets would no longer be credible. Understanding this made me feel better about my twitter troubles. Don’t forget to ## folks!

Weekly Play/Daily Create Reflection #4-(Captain Book Artwork)

This week’s daily create asked us to create our own visual that represented Captain Book. The creative piece was to either show what Captain Book’s logo would look like, what Captain Book would look like, or what the call for help would look like. I opted to go with illustrating what the call for help would look like. The inspiration behind my artwork was the batman logo. I decided I would use smart watch technology (imagine the possibilities) to be the source to project the call for help. Creating the work using a free online art studio was fine, and it’s not pretty by any means. It took me several attempts, and several redo’s as there was no undo button for any mistake that I made. Additionally, I had hard time saving the image to my computer. I ended up taking a screenshot of my artwork as a work around for the save issue. Something I appreciated about this week’s daily create is that it gave me an opportunity to play around with my creative side, since I do not get many chances to be creative anymore. It was fantastic that I was being asked to create an original piece, opposed to remixing someone’s original work. I felt more accomplished, and proud after this particular assignment. Another thing I appreciated was the fact I am able to figure out how to share my image on twitter easily, compared to my previous daily creates. I have seen my personal knowledge of sharing media grow throughout this class as the weekly plays are completed.

Mediated Writing-Reflection

I appreciate the fact that mediated writing is an excellent platform to bring awareness to any given issue, in addition to calling for change. The focus of this mediated writing project was based on a research topic for my organizational change class. The research topic focused on the current lack of additional resources for homeless youth, outside of the basic services already provided. Therefore, I wrote my organizational change proposal on the additional services we could create for homeless youth at risk. It was a fun opportunity for me to bring to life an academic piece of writing. In fact, this platform allowed readers to choose how much they wanted to interact with the information presented to them, through the use of links.

The mediated writing assignment was an interesting one for a number of reasons. What was gained for me as a writer was the ability to create something that succinctly highlighted the key points from my proposal. Rather than presenting a thirteen page document, my audience may have an easier time understanding the main concepts of my organizational change topic.  What was lost for me is the fact that it took a while to sift through my proposal to identify relevant information to include. There was too much information that I felt I needed to leave out, for the sake of simplicity. The use of hyperlinks was a solution that alleviated my concerns that enough information was being provided to my audience. Hyperlinks provided readers with the option to follow up for additional information on their own. I particularly liked the idea of being able to create a hyperlink for people who might be ready to jump in to make a change, in addition to providing a link for the crisis hotline page. Breaking up the text into shorter sections may also contribute to a higher level of interest for my readers. The use of pictures seemed to help make the facts presented more meaningful as well. What may be lost on my audience is the inability to ask follow up questions. I was unable to figure out a way to create a link for my audience to interact with the information presented to them, as well as the author of this mediated writing piece (me). The best I could do was post this to my class blog, which is not public. How would I go about sharing this with the general public who may not be connected to social media?

As I worked through this project, understanding of my topic shifted in a number of ways. I realized that there are many factors that go into organizational change. One factor that I had not yet considered, is what the next step looks like once an organizational change plan has been proposed. If change is to take place, it is important to communicate facts to all stakeholders that may be interested. The way that information is presented matters, therefore mediated writing may be one of the best ways to go about creating positive change within an organization.

Please check out my sway creation! My Sway (Mediated writing)

HQ Fail #3-Daily Create GIF with photos/Sharing created content

Today’s daily create took me almost 30 minutes to create, and upload.  I feel that it should have been a quicker process. Today’s daily create asked us to create a GIF, video or audio that portrayed little mice with mighty stories. Some examples that I saw were GIFs that were made with images of movie title covers, so I decided to give this a shot. At first, I created a GIF that portrayed just one picture, thinking it would move on it’s own. When it was created, nothing happened! So I went back, and added a second picture to the first picture. The GIF started to rotate back and forth between the two images. I decided that I would use this for my daily create. The next step was to share this with the daily create page, and the class. I copied the link, and then proceeded to the daily create website. After searching the page for a place to share the link, I decided to go directly to twitter. I pasted the link directly into twitter, and made the appropriate tags before sharing. Upon checking my post, I realized that I had just posted a code without the GIF actually playing! I quickly deleted the tweet. More or less, it slowly turned into a struggle for me to figure out how to upload the GIF to twitter. I ended up having to google how to do this process. While going back and forth between the help site and twitter, I accidentally clicked on the image creator site where my original GIF link was. I realized there was a twitter icon that I could click on that would instantly share my creation. I opted to go this route. As always, it has been hard for me to figure out how to share content that I have created. There seem to be many ways to go about sharing content, some more difficult than others. I hope to learn how to be more efficient with regards to sharing content that I create.

Reflection-Connected learning post #3 (Daily create)

For this week’s play, I decided to give today’s daily create a shot. The create asked us to portray little mice in mighty stories in the form of a video, GIF, or audio. I chose two favorites to display in the form of a GIF. The first one was An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, and second was The Little Mouse on the Prairie. While the Little Mouse on the Prairie focused on short stories, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West had a powerful impact on me as a young child. It was one of my first times being exposed to immigration. I believe Fievel’s story story relates to many people who are immigrants in real life.