Flight Path: Social Media and Personalized Learning
I’m coming into EDCI 338 from a pretty different starting point than most people in this course. I’m a fourth-year computer science student at UVic, and most of my background is on the technical side for example, machine learning, building software, doing research work rather than studying education directly. So when I think about “personalized learning,” my thinking is about it the way I’d think about a recommendation system or an adaptive algorithm, something that adjusts to a person’s inputs and gets better over time. I don’t have a background in pedagogy or teaching, but I do have a lot of experience with how technical systems shape what information reaches someone and when.
My relationship with social media is mostly personal. I use it the way most people my age do, which is like to keep up with people, follow things I’m interested in, and occasionally get sucked into something I didn’t mean to spend an hour on. I haven’t really used social media as a learning tool before. That’s actually part of why I signed up for this course. I wanted to see personalized learning and digital literacy from the other side, as something you can study and design intentionally, instead of something that just happens to you while you’re scrolling.
What I want to get out of this course is less about a specific final project and more about a shift in how I think. I want to walk away actually able to build a personal learning network on purpose. I’m also interested in the privacy and data ownership side of things- Creative Commons, copyright, fair dealing- because that overlaps with questions I already think about from the tech side, just from a different viewing point. If there’s a specific thing I’d want to explore, it’s probably something around how AI-adjacent tools intersect with personalized learning, since that’s the space I already spend most of my time in.
The part of this course that looks the most scary to me is the “recognize the internet is not a neutral space” objective. My default lens on technology is usually functional: does it work, is it efficient, rather than critical: who does this actually serve and who does it leave out. I expect that shift in thinking will be the real challenge here, more than any specific technical skill. My plan for navigating the course is to mostly stay true about where my blind spots are instead of assuming my technical background makes me think that I am very qualified to skip that reflection, and to actually engage with the weekly discussions instead of treating them as just an assignment.
Thank you
Sneh