Live like a jellyfish

Staudt Willet (2023)  Early-career teachers use social media for different purposes, as they face practical difficulties, such as disparity between their teaching philosophy and the school’s direction and lack of resources, when they first start their teaching career. They separate social media based on their intention: Facebook for emotional support, and Teachers Pay Teachers for educational materials.  Dennen (2026) Networked knowledge activities include a sequence of collecting, curating, sharing, brokering, negotiating, creating, and networking. Through this process, lurkers become networkers. Liminal spaces support lurkers in practicing integration into networks. Therefore, educational institutes must provide these scaffolds for learners to build their own professional learning networks (PLN). Krutka et al. (2017) Teachers tend to build PLN with others with similar interests, and sometimes they cannot apply PLN in education. These authors suggest a framework to expan...

⚠️ This video includes swear words and sexual harassment sentences. I have been lurking online most of the time, not replying or posting anything. Today, I think I found what led me to lurk, even though I am a passive attention seeker in real life lol. The video above shows exactly why. When I observe an online community, there are so many situations like that: derogatory replies for no reason (which is not constructive feedback or an answer to a question), searching for personal information or faking to insult, and the spotlight effect—being worried about getting negative attention from others even though they do not care in fact, which was not addressed in this video, but is one of the main reasons. Many online users humiliate other perspectives for no reason, which exacerbates the spotlight effect. Sometimes they are very mean to novice users, annoyed by the novice not using the jargon they use or asking the same questions that have already been answered. Instead of ignoring the nov...

⬆️ Video of Memex  While reading the book chapter, I was curious about Memex, so I found some videos about it. This is the demonstration of Memex. The book says it inspired Google search systems and hypertext, which is highly relevant to my daily life; I use hyperlinks to organize some recipes on Notion. It also reminded me of the “connected paper” website, which shows the cited papers in a research paper and their citation counts when I enter a DOI. When I click one of the cited papers, it directs me to the publisher's website to read the original paper. I sometimes use this tool to read the original papers of theories. I think this connection system allowed people to expand and explore their interest conveniently. People search for topics they want to learn about; search engines provide hyperlinks to relevant content; and some people note the information using these “connecting” mechanisms so they can easily access it again and find related information, expanding their knowledge....

 Today, I read Chapter 9 of Rainie and Wellman (2013). It was about Networked Information. <Summary of the book chapter> Information wants to be networked. It is meaningful only when it is connected to other people or information, not where it is conveyed in a one-way manner. An example from the 16th-century published Talmud: annotations and notes could be written around the original text, similar to “reply” systems on online platforms. Memex: a device to store and find increasing amounts of information easily by using tags and connecting through trails.→ influenced Google search algorithms and digital networked information. Triple revolution: the development of social networks, the internet, and mobile devices. It led information to grow exponentially, people to have a tendency to find niche information rather than popular content, and other people’s reactions and reviews to be a new indicator of reliability. Information acceptance became a multistep process. Readers activel...

Another topic was about social media. Of course, the topic was not necessarily related to learning; however, I wanted to share a TED video I found on using social media features for learning. For people who do not want to play the video, here is a summary. This is the TED lecture by Luis Von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo. He wanted equality through education, and he found out that language learning could help people earn more money. He explains how he designed Duolingo, a language-learning app, to be addictive like social media: streaks, notifications, and notifications that there will be no further notifications (being passive-aggressive). Although I do not use any social media apps other than LinkedIn— I do not even post anything on the platform—, those features seem to make young generations come back to the app again and again. In this era, when people can interact with others and even with an AI, I think there will be more ways to attract learners. For example, when I practiced Eng...

This week’s topic was about how Generation C learns and acquires information. I would like to reflect on how they acquire information in Web 2.0 and 4.0. Whereas traditional learners were conveyed the one-way content, Generation C is familiar with both creating and consuming multimedia content when learning, such as reading and watching course materials and writing an essay or short-form videos of what they have learned. I am Generation C, but I mostly consume content created by others because I prefer not to disclose my presence online. However, I have written blog posts for Koreans about what I have done to move to the U.S., such as how to get a social security number and how to exchange a Korean driver’s license for an American one, so that other Koreans without acquaintances who live here can be helped. I felt connected to the visitors and encouraged by the comments whenever people thanked me or asked me more questions. This feature of Web 2.0 motivates more people who initially pr...