Adventures in EdTech

In an earlier post, I wrote about a personal data mine that I conducted in thinking about my digital tattoo-the imprint that I have left on the digital world, and how much information about me was truly and readily available on the internet. As the concept of digital tattoos denote, what we post and interact with online can be very difficult to erase, and almost always will leave traces (as with a tattoo, fully removing one’s past actions online can be challenging and time-consuming). I wanted to do a little bit more digging, and was turned onto this Digital Tattoo project website from the University of British Columbia. The site contains a variety of different resources, from quizzes about which aspects of one’s digital tattoo they seek to address or learn more about, to videos and articles and even teaching resources related to that creation and maintenance of a digital tattoo. Albeit a beginner’s reflection, here is what I found: Digital Tattoo Basics Overall, the articles and tuto...

Algorithms . A term that many of us were not familiar with even just a handful of years ago, and now something that can dominate our day-to-day lives, or at minimum our engagement in media platforms. I have had some awareness and familiarity about the basic workings and influences of algorithms, but before this week I did not fully understand just how far the reach of algorithms extended. Honestly, the first thing that usually popped into my head when thinking about algorithms is this scene from Ron Swanson in the show Parks & Rec: Video Source Video courtesy of Peacock, retrieved from YouTube Numbers Dive I wanted to do a little digging, just to get a feel for how often an algorithm might impact someone on social media. This article reports internet users being on social media around 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on average, the same figure reported by this report from Statista. This is roughly the same level that has been seen since 2018, and with estimates above 2 hours per d...

The expansion of technology and the internet, and the impact they can have on our personal and professional lives is ever-growing. The fact that we now lead digital lives holds a ton of weight, to the point where our digital life can become inseparable from our real life. We all have different ways in which we have ‘led’ our digital life, with varying degrees of sharing and cohesion with our ‘real’ lives. I can say personally that I am one who has never been a big ‘sharer’ on social media, usually much more of a viewer than using social media to create any sort of following for myself. With that, I would also say that my online ‘persona’ has not exactly gelled with who I am as a person. I would say this started when I was younger, out of a hope to only put the best of myself online for others to see, which I now realize did not come off as very authentic, because obviously this type of presence does not mirror a real life (or mine, at least-no judgments passed on anyone else!). Then, a...