Hey everyone! This is my nineteenth IEOR 190G Blog Post.

It has been a great semester, but it has come to an end and it is now time to reflect on our time together. In this first blog post I am going discuss Collaborative Social-Media Learning.

In this class we used a lot of social-media tools. From these very blog posts, to our youtube channels to our twitter accounts, we have experimented with pretty much every type of platform. This definitely has benefits the first of which is giving us familiarity with the status quo.

Personally, I am not very up-to-date when it comes to internet presence. I have a Facebook page which I barely use and an email address. When I had to make a twitter account for this class, I finally learnt how to use it. Granted, not know what "tweet" or "retweet" meant prior to a couple of weeks ago is totally my fault and problem, but nonetheless IEOR 190G brought me up to date with today's status quo -- currently having 284 million users, you need to know what Twitter is and how it works.

I have always been one to stay away from social media, afraid of putting my information on the web but something Prof. Lavian said during the semester resonated within me:

"You should be the one in control of what your internet presence looks like, not other people".

This convinced me to make a twitter account and using it for this class has been really cool! It instantly connects you to millions of other users with similar interests and many of my tweets were favorited by users like Braun US and Barrel On. I also found twitter to be very useful when used in the classroom as it helped highlight what my peers felt were important concepts, especially during Efrat Kasznik's guest lecture.

The weekly blog posts and youtube videos were something a was a little bit more used to doing as IEOR 190E, the mobile app challenge lab used a similar format. Blogging really helps to organize your thoughts especially when you also record a video as you are revising what you are going to publish multiple times with each revision helping to tie up loose ends and develop more understanding.

I think that this teaching style can be very beneficial for classes whose material in very current. IEOR 190G's material is exactly that: current. With most of our assignments being based off of our own research and current articles Prof. Lavian shared with us, the collaborative social-media nature of our homework not only forced me to be more aware of current events, but also opened my ears to other current information that my classmates found. Oftentimes, the arguments that people made in their blog post were repetitive, but the few who took an opposing or untraditional stance really made my "gears turn" and it is those posts that I enjoyed reading the most.

To this end, I would highly recommend that professors use blog post more frequently in subject matters that are relevant to current events, and more importantly, get the rest of the class to comment on each other's posts as that is where I gained the most value.

One way that I would improve this way of learning could be to find a platform that would allow all of the students to sign up as a class with individual profiles, kind of like a group, to allow for easier navigation to all of my peers' pages as going back and forth between the google spreadsheet made it easy to lose track of whose blogs I had visited and whose not yet.

That's all for this post and stay tuned for my last post coming up.
As always feel free to watch the video below for a discussion on the above.