Social Media [10/11]

The students walked into class and the blackboard was covered in my illegible scrawl. I had listed different kinds of social media on the board and the first exercise we did that day was  to mark out the different kinds of media that we had used or were familiar with. I was very surprised when I found that none of my students ventured beyond YouTube Facebook, Wikipedia and occasionally Twitter and Flickr. Even if some of the other names were familiar to them I ended up spending some time explaining the rest. It is paradoxical when you see how much of their lives they live virtually and juxtapose that with how little they explore. Perhaps I was saddled with a particularly tech un-savvy lot.

Using examples of social media we arrived at a definition of social media. The rest of the class was devoted to looking at the issues that arise out of social media. Issues that had both advantages and disadvantages. Finally, I ended the class explaining the module to them and talking about articles and relating it to op eds. This conversation was easy because obviously the one thing they had all had experience reading was articles.