EME6414 Summer 2025 Blog

This week, I decided to try out another featured tool, Parlay. It's an AI-based discussion platform designed to enhance classroom participation and peer-to-peer engagement. I’ve been a part of countless discussion boards for classes, and Parlay felt like a breath of fresh air. Dr. Dennen provided it with the article, and the platform automatically generated learning goals, discussion questions, and peer feedback instructions based on the reading. That alone was impressive. It was able to remove some of the overhead work for instructors while still maintaining structure for students. Once I read through the article, I answered the five discussion questions. As of now, I’m the only person who has responded, so I wasn’t able to experience the full back-and-forth conversation flow. Still, the platform had a few features that stood out to me. One of the most fun and unique aspects was that Parlay gave me a secret identity for the discussion—mine was Grace Hopper , which added a light, ...

 I found it coincidental that one of the tools for this week is Discord. I've been using Discord since around 2016, almost exclusively for video games. Back then, it was mostly just a way to talk with friends as we played games, but even now, despite all the new features (video chat, screen sharing, streaming, and bots, etc.), at its core, Discord remains a messaging platform. That’s part of what makes it so unique. This became especially clear to me during our community observation assignment, where I spent time in two esports Discord servers: Fnatic and G2. Both are European professional esports organizations with dedicated servers and tens of thousands of members. While both servers offered similar technical features, my experience in each was drastically different. When I was actively participating in the Fnatic server, it really did feel like a community. There were ongoing conversations, inside jokes, and a genuine sense of belonging. In contrast, my time in the G2 serve...

I chose to read "University Students, Social Media, and Purposeful Use" by Dennen and He (2024). I wanted to reflect on how this study ties back into my own social media habits, both past and present. Thinking back to my undergraduate career (2017 to 2021) where I started to use social media more, I would say I was exclusively a consumer, much like the participants described in the study. I used platforms like Instagram and Twitter to stay connected with friends or for entertainment, but I rarely thought of them as tools for learning or career development. What really stood out to me in the study was how consistently students saw themselves as passive users. They scrolled, watched, liked, but rarely posted or contributed to larger conversations. That was definitely me at the time. What I found especially insightful, though, was the discussion around digital literacy. Social media has always been present for today’s students. It’s been an exploratory space where they grow up s...

I read the draft chapter for "Social Media for Active Learning" and wanted to use this blog post to reflect on it. As I was reading through the chapter, I was reflecting on how strongly I am partaking in each of the knowledge activities (NKA) this summer. Specifically, in terms of the classes I am taking (EME6414 and EME5250). Collect: Right now, I wouldn’t say I’m actively collecting resources for my classes. In previous semesters, I was more intentional about saving articles or bookmarking helpful tools. This term has felt different, maybe more focused on participation than resource-gathering. I suppose our first assignment in EME6414 involved collecting observations from online communities, but it didn’t feel like collecting in the same way the NKA framework describes. Curate: This is just beginning to pick up. In EME6414, I’ve started curating resources for our upcoming project, and in EME5250, my group and I are curating articles for our collaborative assignment. I’ve ...

I took a look at the readings for this week and my curiosity piqued at the last article listed. "It's not just the tool but the educational rationale that counts" by Gavriel Salomon (2016) had me glued to my screen. I think it was written earlier than 2016, though I could be wrong. Unfortunately, Salomon passed in 2016 so I was not able to find any direct follow up to the article. I really wish I could pick his brain about technology and education now! Salomon’s words still ring true years later. Technology is constantly being pushed on university campuses, but is it for the right reasons? AI is the boom right now, but what outcomes are we using to measure it with? Are we still chasing traditional benchmarks, or are we thinking about how learning itself is changing? Do we want college graduates to be able to access information or possess knowledge? Higher education has largely followed the rest of society in adopting technology, fast and sometimes not thinking it through...

With one of our assigned readings being about open education this week, I knew I had to write a blog post about it. I’m currently taking EME5250 (Open Education and Open Educational Resources) at the same time as this class, so I have already come to learn a lot about OER in just five weeks. Caswell et al. (2008) offer a great overview of the OER movement, and surprisingly, much of what they wrote nearly two decades ago still holds true today. In fact, I wish I had read this article in week one of EME5250. It would’ve been the perfect primer! At its core, the OER movement is about expanding access to education by making learning resources free, open, and available to anyone, anywhere. In theory, it’s hard to argue against that. But in application, things get complicated quickly. Licensing, copyright clearance, funding, and sustainability all pose major challenges. As Caswell et al. (2008) note, institutions often start OER projects with private funding, but long-term support requires r...

 If you were to ask me about intellectual property (IP) concerns before this summer, I would have had nothing to say. I've never had to think or really consider IP concerns in online environments because I lurk a majority of the time. However, this class and EME5250 have shown me in five weeks how crucial these things are. As a creator, I’d say I have little to no concerns about IP right now. Like I said, I almost exclusively lurk online, so I’m not putting much out there. But as a user, my concerns are growing. In a rapidly expanding digital space with things like AI replicating and remixing content, intellectual property is more vulnerable than ever. It’s no longer just about using an image without credit or forgetting to cite a blog post. It’s about tracing what’s original, what’s fair use, and what’s been pulled from a model trained on someone else's work. The reality is, most people don’t naturally learn the do’s and don’ts of intellectual property. Heck, I didn’t know an...