Quick answer: There’s no single “first” social media platform, since the idea evolved in stages. SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, is usually credited as the first site to combine the core features we now associate with social media: personal profiles, visible friend lists, and the ability to browse a friend’s connections. But the roots go back […]
Social Media
Holidayton Vacation and Holly Days in Downtown Dayton!
Over the weekend of December 12-14, I was excited to get a chance to participate in a special experience in Downtown Dayton with some cool local social media creators. It was called Holidayton Vacation and was organized by Anne Kane. We got to stay at the Hilton Garden Inn at the Dayton Arcade and enjoyed […]
YouTube Channel Growth and Future Plans
Over about the past year and a half I’ve been slowly but surely recording videos about local history, preservation, and redevelopment for my Dayton history YouTube channel. A couple weeks ago I was excited to see that my latest video, about what happened to a street where a surprising number of prominent early Dayton business […]
Continuous Partial Attention: How Devices Negatively Affect Our Focus
In today’s environment of constant connectivity, we routinely slog through multiple tasks in a single session. Blinking notifications pull us away from whatever we had been doing to something more pressing. We surf the web by opening up multiple browser tabs and scrolling back and forth between various articles, email accounts, social media streams and other […]
Is Social Media Preventing Students from Being “Good Digital Citizens”?
The digital age demands new competencies in order for us to be fully literate citizens. With information now being created by everyone on various web platforms, we need to critically think about what and how we consume. Today we are also all content curators whether we like it or not, as we decide what we […]
Where Can You Find the Most Useful and Insightful Conversations Online?
One major goal for teachers and librarians today is to foster “information literacy,” a set of skills that allows us to efficiently communicate what information we need, understand where and how to search, think critically about information and use it strategically to achieve our goals. Information literacy instruction typically involves activities like a discussion of what makes […]