Assignment 13- Part 2

Discussion of Collaborative Social Media Learning part 2

This post will discuss a couple more positive aspects of using social media and a couple of the cons.

A big point that can be seen as both a  positive and a negative for this is that is it obviously public and thus can effect someone’s reputation. The positive side of this is that it helps you build your name and can potentially give you credibility if someone sees the excellent work that you have done as a student and extrapolates that to excellent work that you would maybe do as an employee. Further it shows a certain skill level and understanding of patents that most other college graduates would not possess.

The negative side of this is if one is self-conscience of their posts and would rather not have it be public than this could be an issue. This would be because they do not feel they understood the material well enough and thus the blog posts, twitter comments, and YouTube videos are a negative representation of their academic or intellectual abilities. The different would be that a PHD publicizes their thesis which is something they spent years working on opposed to a blog post which a student spent anywhere between minutes to hours on. Overall I acknowledge this con, but I would argue that you should be proud of the work you turn in and if you are not then work harder on it.

Another pro and con comes from the community aspects of using social media. In recent times we have seen the increase of a sharing economy. This has been seen through companies such as Airbnb and Uber. So if we see knowledge and insight as a private good that can be shared then I guess we are all part of this sharing economy to an extent by putting our knowledge and insight out there for everyone else to use and in return each of us receive the insight and knowledge of others. It makes knowledge and ideas much more like an open source project which in the end helps everyone by increasing everyones knowledge rather than a system where the information is only for a privileged few.

The negative side of this is that while we built a virtual community we failed at building a real one. I have commented on just about everyone in this class’s youtube and blog posts, but I have actually spoken to extremely few of them. As a result I may have gained some of their knowledge but I didn’t gain their trust, friendship, etc. Overall this could have been solved by having a group project or a different form of in class discussion in smaller groups.