After engaging with several social media tools and exploring a range of topics on the impact of social media on our lives during the course of this semester. I’m going to pick apart the lessons I’ve learned from the various challenges I’ve completed and how I will incorporate these skills into my academic studies or into my daily life.
One of the first tasks given to me was to create my own “WordPress” blog. For each Badge, I had to document a two-hundred worded summary and analysis of the learning I’d acquired by completing the exercises associated with the given badge. I found this to be an exciting yet difficult task as this steps outside the norm of my undergraduate degree, being an engineer. Social media has a big impact on daily life, so by using” WordPress” this allowed me to participate and engage in something that felt very current to me. Blogging has been shown to offer tremendous benefits including creativity, better communication, skills and boosted confidence (Thompson,2018). I felt that my general grasp and application of the course material improved as I was required to write all that I learned in my own words. The use of this creative writing exercise improved my creative thinking, vocabulary and my persuasion/communication skills which are core skills that are essential to the modern day workplace. The skills you gain from writing, analyzing other writer’s work and interacting with your fellow students can be invaluable in helping you advance in your career (Anglesey,2013).
The importance of social media for marketing and customer service strategies has increased over the last decade. Social media has made it easier to keep up with social engagement with fast paced feedback, allow businesses to improve their customer relationships/evolve in general. Social Media tools allow businesses to aggregate all messages sent to all your profiles and networks into one spot and provides a team collaboration environment. Management tools allow you to analyze your posting strategy, time your content accordingly and to analyze Social Performance. Throughout college, I’ve communicated with fellow students about college work through apps such as “Facebook” and “Whatsapp”, which I believe has had a positive effect on my academic performance. In our society, social media platforms can be used to assist learning and sharing knowledge ” students of 21st century cannot study without the use of social media which serves as a platform for information sharing a knowledge production”(Chugh,R).The tasks I underwent to improve my knowledge in this field were to create a “Map Mashup” and to create both a “Pinterest” and “Pocket” account. Overlaying data is an essential skill in managing and manipulating data online. Managing data is a vital skill I will incorporate into work-life as it reduces the potential for errors. With clean data, clear policies and processes, a business owner can deal in reality, and access granular bits of that reality to fulfill its mission. (Oz du Soleil,2013). Pocket is an app essential for writers as it’s an app by saves/organizes articles in one place. Pinterest is a clever site used by many startup companies to broadcast products to a large demographic. Although I can see the benefits of these apps, I don’t think they’ll feature heavily in my future as I don’t seek out a carrier in writing or in advertising/business in which familiarity of these apps would be pivotal.
Focus was then changed to assessing how social media tools help visualise information for yourself and for others. One of our tasks for this concept was to use “Piktochart” which is a media tool used to make various types of infographics. This tool is widely used in the graphic design industry. I learned/engaged with key concepts in creating a match-day program whilst also discovering that this could be a great tool to personalise my C.V. for future job applications. Visual communication allows us to deliver information more directly, grab more attention/evoke a greater response off the audience or to increase the credibility of your message. Visual communication is truly a powerful tool you can use when you are trying to make a point! (Nishadha,2018). Next we used “Screencastomatic” to create an educational video and I uploaded it then to “YouTube”. This video gave the viewer an interactive visual tutorial of how to look up something on google images. Social media when used correctly can be an excellent tool for one to further educate themselves. I found an excellent article online on using “YouTube” as a teaching and learning tool. The results of this article concluded that a large amount of students rely heavily on “YouTube” to solve problems or get a greater understanding and that teaching and educational methods should be adapted to coincide with the fast evolving world. Using visual objects, especially videos to explain something will make it easier for students to visualize and actually understand the topic.. (Moghavvemi, S., Sulaiman, A., Jaafar, N. I., & Kasem, N. (2018). I’ll continue to use YouTube to aid my academic learning as I find it the most effective education tool to engage all your senses i.e. auditory visual and your cognitive thought.
The concluding lesson that was given to us was how we can develop and track our digital footprint. Digital reach refers to the number of users who have come across or can come across a particular content on a social platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn. There are mixed reports out there on whether you can control your digital reach or not with many people believing that our phones are listening to us. The main benefit I drew from this task was learning how to track my own digital footprint. One of the challenges I completed was to draft an updated privacy policy for a social media platform of my choice. This quickly led me to realize the dangers I was exposed to and everything I could be liable for. We were asked to create a LinkedIn profile, which I intended to do soon anyway as I’m applying for internships. My LinkedIn will play a huge part in my professional career, both in making business connections and also by portraying myself in the most professional way possible. For this final task I learned how pivotal it is to market yourself and how to give the best possible impression of yourself at all times otherwise you “can inadvertently give others an all-too accurate” description of yourself (Keogh,2018). This could cause you to be misrepresented by something you posted years ago.
References:
Anglesey, L. 2013. 10 Ways a Creative Writing Course Can Benefit Your Career , Available at: http://careertipster.com/education/10-ways-a-creative-writing-course-can-benefit-your-career/
Chugh, R. ‘Harnessing Social Media as a Knowledge Management Tool. 74-89
Keogh, O. 2018. Should you Ease your Digital Footprint to progress your career? Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/work/should-you-erase-your-digital-footprint-to-progress-your-career-1.3434973
Moghavvemi, S., Sulaiman, A., Jaafar, N. I., & Kasem, N. (2018). Social media as a complementary learning tool for teaching and learning: The case of youtube. International Journal of Management Education, 16(1), 37-42. doi:10.1016/j.ijme.2017.12.001
Thompson, M. 2018. Why your students should blog: 6 Powerful Benefits, Emerging Ed Tech, Available at: https://www.emergingedtech.com/2018/04/why-your-students-should-blog-6-powerful-benefits/
Nishadha, 2018. 5 Amazing Advantages of Visual Communication You Can’t Ignore, Available at:https://creately.com/blog/diagrams/visual-communication-benefits/
Oz du Soleil, 2013. 3 Benefits of Good Data Management, Available at:https://datascopic.net/the-benefits-of-good-data-management/
"OfficialChizzNews" Charlie Mc Carthy 16444162 