Twenty-Post Challenge: Question Answered

This is the seventh post in a twenty-post series blogging challenge. The challenge is to answer a question that somebody has asked you online or in-person.

I was asked in a job interview recently: How would I go about creating technical documentation for a product? Read on below to find out how I might approach a technical documentation or curriculum design project.

First, I would get to know my audience. Where is my audience posting their thoughts? Are they posting on Hacker News or Reddit; or are they reading white papers? I need to find my audience and get a picture of what’s important to them, what problems they’re having, and what kind of language they’re using to describe the tool or product. What’s they’re overall impression and what information is currently prominent about my product? These questions will give me an accurate description of who I should write for.

Next, I would learn the tool myself and document my steps starting with how to complete basic functions with the tool or product. How do they get started with the install and a basic project? If developer’s notes are available, I will integrate them into my outlined understanding of the tool. If there’s current documentation, it can be remixed or used to build new, better documentation. Sometimes this step requires some trial and error to learn how a new user would organically use a new tool.

Once I have a good understanding of the basics of a tool and an outline of the documentation started, I would then take screenshots and create images where visual support to understanding is needed. Sometimes it’s easier to complete the outline of the major functions and the instructions and then come back at the end to take screenshots when you fully understand what you’re looking at.

Lots of code on this screen. Image by Tudor Baciu.

Lastly, I would finalize the documentation and request feedback from any stakeholders available to review the documentation, ensuring its accuracy and efficiency to reaching the stated goals. I would verify the consistency of word usage, directional word usage, headings, formatting, and accessibility best practices applied. The documentation would then be deployed externally and I would appreciate feedback from any user utilizing the documentation.

Technical documentation, especially for a tool that will have updates and new features in the future, is a flexible, growing foundation for learning a product or removing headaches when a problem presents itself: A communication of solutions and pathways.

#amberclee #20postchallenge

Step into Augmented Reality Technology to Succeed, AMC: Advice from an Investor

As an investor (and customer) with AMC, I couldn’t help but notice that they don’t seem to be employing augmented reality technology, in both their lobby and theater spaces, to make the experience more interactive for customers, and ultimately to make AMC more successful in the business (so that my stock goes up). Check out some of these ideas, AMC, if you are listening!

Augmented reality overlays visually interactive elements over your real environment, which you view through your phone’s screen. Think of the mobile phone game Pokémon Go or how many online stores offer a virtual furniture preview.

AMC should really begin enhancing their theaters by analyzing the lobby space, where guests spend the majority of their time waiting either to get into a movie or while in line to get snacks. Arcade games unique to the AMC theater chain or paired with current showings. Virtual AR games supported by individual user devices and the theater’s wi-fi network can substitute for physical (old-school) arcade machines, which can break and/or quickly go out of style.

Games chosen should be done with careful thought and include playtesting with feedback, if possible. For example, an article by Business Wire (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180220006051/en/National-CineMedia-NCM-Brings-Augmented-Reality-to-Movie-Theaters ) details three examples of AR being developed by company Noovie for use in a movie theater. “Cinevaders” encourages patrons to shoot lasers at aliens invading the theatre. “Emoji Escape” has patrons catching emojis throughout the lobby space. Unfortunately, these two ideas are not really viable due to the safety of patrons looking down at their phones while moving in a lobby possibly filled with other patrons to play the Emoji Escape game; and as for Cinevaders, it’s not a socially sensitive idea to have people shooting anything while inside a theater. Finding these weak points in game design can often be observed through playtesting.

Also described in the article is the game Munchie Mania. This AR game is a great idea for AMC to incorporate, and doesn’t pose safety concerns like the other ideas. The description from the creator of the game, Noovie: “Munchie Mania – Who doesn’t like popcorn at the movies? Players will toss flying kernels to fill up their individual popcorn bucket – and you can play at home!”




Some other ideas for incorporating AR (and interactive technology) into AMC theater spaces:

• Tell stories about your brand or the origin of your products. Maybe you have an interesting story about one of your founders that you can share or about the origins of the movie camera and projection screens.

• Offer post-event access to event content. Try an AR photo booth that can be shared later or the ability to share game stats or replays.
  

• Offer a tour, a model, or an experience. You could create new experiences seasonally, to match happenings in popular culture or scientific happenings (like space exploration), or to compliment marketing promotions.

• Engage all five of their senses: this idea could go along with marketing or seasonal promotions. AR content, music, seasonal food choices could all have some more thought and variety offered throughout the year.

• Give theater patrons unique opportunities to share on social media including photos, short videos or badges of earned game achievements/rankings. Connecting your AR or other fun technologies with social media adds to patron excitement and also acts as free referral advertising for AMC.

• Partner with a 3D space mapping technology company like GILDA (https://gilda.co) for precise location mapping of the inside of theaters and lobby spaces. This ensures that AR interactions are triggered in the correct locations, encouraging a more accurate and seamless guest experience.

• One last technology idea - that’s not AR - is to incorporate ordering food through an app with qr pickup, similar to the pizza pickup portal used by the Little Caesars pizza chain for hot food items.

Try a few of these ideas or try them all, AMC, and you’re sure to increase customer satisfaction and your overall profits.

An Un-Complicated Review of It's Complicated by dana boyd

The following is a book review and analysis completed for my graduate Qualitative Methods class... enjoy!

An Un-complicated Review of “It’s Complicated” by dana boyd

This book review could literally take on a hundred different directions of analysis in light of the methods, theories, and self-exploration of ourselves that we have learned this semester. “It’s Complicated” by researcher dana boyd is a novel approach to explain the new digital frontier that our young people are navigating on a daily basis, exploring the meanings of privacy and how young people establish their identities online, and the conflict that this causes with parental anxiety in networked public spaces. This book review will first review dana’s methods to the ethnography, provide brief summary of her main points of the book, and then will explore several qualitative elements including discourse analysis of referring terms and tone.




This book of 213 pages plus extensive notes, bibliography, and appendix; was a relatively easy read and was definitely written for a non-academic audience: for teachers, for parents, and for people working with the youth of today. Her main points are introduced in the preface and introduction content; and then the following eight chapters describe the main points of her research. dana’s main thesis is to “describe and explain the networked lives of teens to the people that worry about them…” (boyd, preface). She defines these new digital spaces as “networked publics” which “are publics both in the spatial sense and in the sense of an imagined community” (boyd, p.9). “Networked publics are publics that are restructured by network technologies” (p.8) giving them the characteristics of being both “(1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd, p.8). This book argues that as real public spaces disappear (like movie theaters or malls or parks) and as young people have busier and geographically-challenged lives that make getting together in person hard, they are seeking these accessible public places in this new digital environment to negotiate identity, find friends, or simply to hang out with others. She readily admits that the tools and apps used will continue to change, but that the needs these youth are meeting in these public spaces will not change and are the same that youth sought to fulfill in non-networked physical publics of the past.

I did not find that dana explicitly outlaid her research strategy nor the exact amount of interviews or interactions she had with youth: this would probably be impossible to account for in the face paced communication that happens online today. She did detail that she “crisscrossed the United States from 2005 to 2012, talking with and observing teems from eighteen states and a wide array of socioeconomic and ethnic communities” (boyd, preface). She goes on to report “166 formal, semi-structured interviews with teens during the period of 2007-2010” in various physical locations (homes, libraries, schools, etc.). It would be interesting to read some of the questions that she provided to the youth and to learn if the anonymity of the internet influenced her answers to be more truthful or less truthful. Were these interviews conducted over a recorded video chat or where they simply snippets of online text chat sessions: we don’t know this through her text and as a qualitative researcher, I would be interested to read some of these raw items. I am also interested in how she located these youth for interviews - did she randomly contact students? Did she contact them through schools? Did she find friends of friends? It’s not completely clear from my reading of the text.

I was surprised by several things as I read the book: topics of addiction and privacy that I had not considered before with regards to youth online. My views were especially challenged by boyd’s assertion that youth are not digital natives: something that I had assumed and used several times over the years when thinking about young people growing up in this technological world. She explores this topic of are youth digital natives in chapter 7. Being that I graduated from high school in 2002, I remember my family getting our first computer in the early 1990s, going from AOL dial up and then learning the new internet technologies of MySpace and Facebook. Thankfully, data was not collected on the scale it is being collected at now, and we did not have to worry about privacy as much in those very early days: we could make mistakes and then delete our posts or our accounts, and it wouldn’t have been recorded anywhere. Everything that we learned was from the same base that our parents were learning from; and our only computer was located in the living room because it was a shared resource - not a device for being constantly publicly connected like the youth of today feel the need to be. Researcher boyd makes references to several of these issues of privacy and identity seeking and cites that young people see privacy differently than we as adults do - and that trying on identities happens for several reasons in the online networked public that can have meaning - or not!

In analyzing the book in a more structural way and less content focus, dana’s tone remains professional yet entirely non-academic. Everything is explained in a way that the average parent or teacher should be able to understand (which can really be a wide range of understandings and literacy ranges). dana is advocating for these youth’s natural and safe exploration of this new digital world, and she wants everyone to be able to read and understand the points she is making. She is upfront with the main point of her book in the preface and in the introduction; she concisely and descriptively builds her points in the eight chapters following, using brief academic findings to support her thinking, but not straying from the simplistic way of describing the situations and youth perspectives regarding identity, privacy, addiction, danger, bullying, inequality, literacy, and how youth are simply searching for a “public of their own” where parents are not constantly looking over their shoulders at every conversation. Her tone is mostly third person as the narrator, separate and largely non-involved in the storyline past the role of the researcher. She maintains an etic perspective, perhaps because she is speaking to the adults of the world in her text.

dana is respectful when quoting the youth and names them all (or pseudonyms them) in her appendix “teen demographics” (boyd, p.215). In her book, she refers to the youth and others with respect and by name (or by pseudonym). I found it interesting to read through the youth characteristics and especially the services that they were active on: facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others that don’t even exist anymore. When I interact with youth, I am amazed at the new apps they are communicating through and it is always changing: “even though many of the tools and services that I reference throughout this book are now passe, the core activities I discuss… are here to stay” (boyd, p.8). There will always be some new, more visual or more interactive app that the young people will be willing to explore to meet these needs of a “place to hang out and connect with friends” (boyd, p.5) that is “utterly essential to her social life” (boyd, p.5). As I also remember life pre-AOL dial up days, dana recounts that she too “spent my own teen years online, and I was among the first generation of teens who did so” (boyd, p.4), so while her tone remains from an etic perspective, she has definitely experienced for herself firsthand the beginnings of many of the new teen phenomena she tries to explain through her book.

In regards to Marilyn Lichtman’s definition of ethnography in our textbook, dana’s text addresses many of the ‘issues’ of ethnography as she describes her findings:

Issue (Lichtman p.74-75)	Example from boyd
Doing fieldwork and taking field notes	While boyd does not explicitly state that she took field notes nor does she provide any in the appendix, I am making the assumption that she kept some kind of researcher’s notes along her multiple year study.
Participant observation	Observation is where boyd’s study appears to begin and it is a tool that she continues to use throughout her study to guide her practice, find her interviews, and make generalizations. boyd conducts observations in person and online for her study.
Interviewing individuals	boyd conducts 166 formal, semi-structured interviews with youth. This implies that she also conducted many informal interviews with youth, but also with adults and perhaps adults within the networked publics space.
Gaining access	boyd did not detail much about how she gained access to interviews with the youth, nor how she chose the youth that she spoke to.
Informed consent	boyd would have most certainly had formal consent granted to speak to all the 166 formal interviews conducted. She did not detail how this unfolded in her study, but perhaps there is a more formal academic paper that details her methods.
Understanding cultures	boyd has done an excellent job understanding the culture of youth in the networked publics despite the anxieties and negative perceptions that an adult would approach this with.
Thick descriptions	Throughout this book, boyd is connecting concepts in a logical way and providing descriptions of a larger happening that she divides into the main chapter titles.
Underlying meanings	This aspect did not seem to be addressed openly in the text. It is assumed that the researcher reported honestly and that the youth had no motivations to lie, but this is not verifiable.
Reflexive behaviors	This issue is also not addressed openly by boyd. She does share her background and her interest in this subject, but does not connect it to her broader analysis.
Ethics	boyd actively works to protect the youth’s identities while still accurately representing their accounts. While not stated directly in this book, it is assumed that she utilized consent for her interactions. As an advocate for youth rights, it is also assumed that she was respectful and ethical in all her interactions.
Writing or producing an ethnography	boyd has produced an organized, comprehensive description in an ethnographic format that is intended for a general audience.

In conclusion, dana boyd’s ethnographic book “It’s Complicated” is an enjoyable read that will inform the average person about what today’s youth are experiencing online in these new “networked publics.” It advocates for the often misunderstood youth’s perspective and it challenges adults to put their anxieties aside about digital communities and misconceptions about how youth are using these new communication tools. There will always be new mediums, faster ways to communicate from a distance, and new shiny apps with catchy features; but today’s youth need spaces to negotiate their adult identities and safely navigate to adulthood. Through dana’s presented perspectives, we can help support the youth pioneering these new forms of communications while combating the ever present inequalities and negative personalities that are present whether offline or online.


References

boyd, dana (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lichtman, Marilyn (2013). Qualitative research in education: A user’s guide (3rd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Instructional Design: An Opportunity for Integrity and Inclusion for ALL

This is a the first of many papers being written for my Digital Media and Learning class this Fall:

Links to papers read online:

https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.collier.sts.vt.edu/sts5424/pdfs/Marx_Braverman.pdf

https://via.hypothes.is/http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/Winner.pdf

http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/016224399201700302

https://via.hypothes.is/http://codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf

ethics of care - pluralism by hello-magpie on DeviantArt

Synthesis and analysis:

Before beginning my first synthesis paper, I wanted to understand “synthesis” fully, since it’s a term that I have not been asked to perform very much [directly albeit] in my previous coursework. I found a great example and guidance after searching “blooms synthesis” as I wanted to know what our tested Bloom’s Taxonomy would define synthesis as: http://www1.center.k12.mo.us/edtech/Blooms/Synthesis.htm

As the page linked above defines, my articles/creations to follow will adhere to the following learning objective verbs and expressions:

Synthesis
Putting together ideas into a new or unique
product or plan.

Guiding questions for synthesis level:

What changes would you make to solve _______?
How would you improve _______?
Can you propose and alternative _______?
What way would you design _______?
Suppose you could _______. What would you do ________?
Can you construct a model that would change _______?
Can you think of an original way for _______?
Can you predict the outcome if _______?

This week, we were asked to read in order and synthesize 4 articles:

K. Marx, The Machine Versus the Worker
L. Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?
B. Pfaffenberger, Technological Dramas
L. Lessig, Code 2.0, Ch. 7

Our instructor promised us that it really wasn’t that much reading.

Karl Marx is a name I have heard many times, but before reading the assigned article, I really couldn’t remember his major stances on the worker and the machine-industrial complex. The reading assigned was only two pages in length, but was substantial in the new perspective brought to me attention. His major points in this reading are:

• p. 156 “The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer. This direct antagonism between the two comes out most strongly, whenever newly introduced machinery competes with handicrafts or manufactures, handed down from former times.“
• He states that “machinery not only acts as a competitor…” but that the capital generated “is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes” (p.156).
• On page 157, he gives the example of Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer: he testifies that “Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have reduced the number of grown-up men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable increase in my profits.” Mechanical innovation and replacement of human workers was seen as a solution to long standing strikes in many industries.

Prior to reading Langdon Winner’s article “Do Artifacts have Politics?,” I had no experience with the author, but I did have an idea of the article content: since most products or innovations are created for someone, or a specific audience or consumer type, I can infer that the affordances generated will favor that group, and that favoritism in design can be called ‘politics.’ After reading the selection, the following are the main points presented:

• He states that “At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged by their contributions… but also for the ways in which they embody specific forms of power and authority” (p. 19). My thought in reaction to this claim of embodying power and authority is: ‘is this an intentional assertion of power/authority?’, but then I think it wouldn’t matter whether the answer was yes or no, rather that we must have designers with the highest ethical standards for all people so that the assertion of power and authority through innovations is a positive contribution intended to help the greatest amount of people, making considerations for as many learner types as possible and for known accessibility concerns. I am then reminded that sometimes good products come out of ill intentioned designs, such as nuclear power that grew out of military applications or maybe medicines developed through unethical methods that end up saving thousands of others.

Moving on to the next article “Technological Dramas”, I can speculate that the idea of artifact features having politics will be expanded upon by Bryan Pfaffenberger. Main points of this reading include:

• Confirming my earlier thoughts about designers and how their personal values affect the social and political considerations and outcomes in a design, Pfaffenberger states that “The demonstration that technology is socially shaped (MacKenzie and Wacjman 1985) or socially constructed (Pinch and Bijker 1987) is a major achievement of science and technology studies (STS).... To account fully for a technical design, one must examine the technical culture, social values, aesthetic ethos, and political agendas of the designers” (p.282).
• He goes on to assert that “Technical innovation provides an opportunity to embed political values in technological production process and artifacts, which then diffuse throughout society…” (p. 283).
• Pfaffenberger then makes several claims that I personally questioned as I read them. I questioned the sources quoted for support of his idea, and I questioned the methods used to determine the thinking of the designers or managers described in the studies. He mentions “Noble (1986) shows how managers hoped that numerically designed machine tools would deskill lathe operators and transfer process control from the shop floor to management. Barker and Downing (1985) show how networked word-processing technology has been used to erode the work autonomy of typists by monitoring the number of times per hour that a typist presses a key” (p. 284). How do you ‘show how a manager hoped’ for something? Why does having a measure by which to compare yourself to others while typing at work ‘erode work autonomy’? Is this really what the managers or designers were thinking when designing these tools - thinking of controlling their workers? I do not think so. I would imagine that most inventors and good managers in business are creative, kind people looking to better the populations, the work conditions, and the precision and quality of products.

I decided to move onto the next article, because I did not have the time to locate and verify each of the sources that I found a little biased that were used to support Pfeffenberger’s argument.

Lessig’s open source text “Code 2.0” was published in 2006 and appears to be a very straight forward, comprehensive, and foundational text to understanding power in our digital world, despite being over ten years old now. We were asked to read chapter seven.

• This author details how our lives are regulated by first naming us “as a dot” and then analogizing how we (quite sarcastically as “a pathetic dot”) are controlled in behavior by social norms (p. 122), that “the market is also a constraint,” laws, and architecture (p. 123).
• I found the multiple historical examples of design choices to control or direct people fascinating, especially the French Revolution (p. 127) and the later building of wider streets; because I have been there and can visualize this constraint fully and how it later affected history during Napoleon's rule.
• I appreciated Lessing’s inclusion of three major socially excluded classes: “discrimination against the disabled,” “drugs” (p. 131), and “abortion” (p. 132). Heavily socially stigmatized, these populations can give back to the world in innumerable ways, yet we seek to disinclude them or ostracize them for their actions. Unfortunately there are many other populations and stigmatized groups that can bring a lot to the world. I think of refugees and immigrants, people of gender or identity minority, people of religious minority or misunderstood groups; an endless list could be created entitled ‘you are different because ______, but you can still participate in and create fully’. I think this is what the creators of the internet intended (that unknowingly started humankind into all this digital social mess ;-) ).

In closing, I will attempt to provide a brief synthesis and closing to conclude this week’s reading assignment. I think that digital media and the internet has the unique power to make the world a more equal place for all. I think this is how it was intended when it was envisioned and built, but I think a handful of people’s greed and business interests seek to build on the majority’s good intentions and desire for inclusion for all people. Two ways that I think could encourage this positive ethic and intention in designers and developers is to 1. apply the principle of ‘care ethic’ in all design ventures and 2. Encourage broad adoption of a code of ethics for designers, similar to the oath a doctor would take prior to service with patients (but obviously a little less focused on life and death, but rather access and value in intentions).

I am particularly interested in adapting the physicians Hippocratic oath into a guiding document for designers and inventors., so I wanted to share it here for your consideration too. The current medically-focused oath reads as:

“I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

• I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
• I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
• I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
• I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
• I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
• I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
• I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
• I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
• If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
  

—Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today.”

We have great powers as designers to shape the experiences in our world to elevate all of humankind for higher purposes, or to harm and control. We have power in the way we design things and to which attributes we craft. We can also be the gatekeepers and choose not break our own values just for monetary gain or otherwise negative purpose. May we all design with integrity and care.

Google+ Lesson Plan

Collaborative content curation on Google+ for a freshman/sophomore poetry class

Sample Lesson Plan (prior to integrating technology)
Main page - http://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/first_year_comp_teaching_materials/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Lesson page - http://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/first_year_comp_teaching_materials/style.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Teaching Materials for First Year Composition at East TN State University:

In-class exercise: Style and Fluency Translate your prose into lines of verse Engl 4057/5057 ETSU, O'Donnell, Weds Feb 1, 2012 (O'Donnell, ETSU, First-year composition course materials (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.) 1.  In the essay you plan to turn in today, identify a paragraph, or portion of a paragraph, that you think is particularly fluent/ musical. 2.  Transcribe that passage into your notebook, as lines of verse and stanzas.  Feel free to modify the passage, as you transcribe it, if you feel some changes will make it flow better. 3.  Be prepared to present your verse to the class, using the "doc cam."

“Life Before TIM”
Since the learners are directed to use the doc cam for their in class presentation, this is a simple and effective in-class tool for sharing a paper document and this qualifies the current lesson as a level 2 on the TIM, called “adoption.” “Adoption” is described as when “the teacher directs the students in the conventional and the procedural use of technology.” The doc cam is the only required technology indicated in her lesson, since she indicates the use of a notebook for writing instead of a word processor or online presentation tool. This part of the current lesson would barely be considered level 1 or “entry” level, if you consider a notebook and pen/pencil technology. There are several opportunities to enhance the lesson with technology to better motivate students, encourage the development of 21st century skills, increase efficiency and leave more in time class for discussion, and widen the audience to the student work. From my personal experience, this lesson plan example is often how a first or second year composition class is taught: typically very lecture based, heavy reading outside of class, and sometimes essays are the only “creating” around the material that the students are allowed. What if we used technology to make the lesson more successful and more fun?
The instructional goals are not stated in this lesson plan, but are assumed to be similar to:

1. The learner will be able to identify basic components of poetry (“verse” “stanza” “meter” “rhyme” “rhythm” and other key terms related to poetry).
2. The learner will be able to create an original work of poetry.
3. The learner will be able to present their original work.

“Life After TIM” - Lesson Plan after Technology Integration
Students will utilize the popular social media tool “Google+” to create a collaborative online community showcasing student work while curating a collection of poetry related digital reference material. To complete the updated lesson on poetry, students will use several additional technologies:

• Optional: A digital word processing tool to create their original works - this can be Word, Google Doc, a blog, etc.
• A internet search tool - Google search, Google scholar, and YouTube will probably be the best resources
• A Google+ account, accessed by app on a mobile device or through a computer browser

 While students are still welcome to create their poetry outside of a digital tool, the text must be inputted into a digital format and can be done so directly into Google+. Students can also input their poetry into a word processor if they so choose and that is why it is listed as optional. Many times I will create my text outside of a social media tool because 1. It is easier to edit for grammar and punctuation in a word processing tool; and 2. I can save a copy independent of the tool for later reference. Learners will also utilize a search tool to find interesting resources related to poetry or an article, video, or image that directly teaches or expresses their specific topic with the class.
By using the technologies suggested, the lesson will increase to at least a level 3 “adaptation,” which is described by the TIM matrix as “the teacher facilitates students in exploring and independently using technology.” Time in class for discussion will increase because the walls of the classroom will disappear. What is meant by that is once you introduce a social media tool such as Google+, Twitter, or other always-on and available on any device tool, you open your learning beyond your course times as learners engage with the technology. Social media as used in this lesson plan employs the Connected Learning principles of:

• Interest powered: since learners are developing their poetry from their own essay content, the topic can be anything of interest to the student that they wish to develop. So the lesson is already very interest powered. What takes this up a notch is the introduction of the internet search and the curation of a digital collection - students can become even more interested searching for informative material about their topic or about the development of poetry. Learners will hopefully become interested when reading their classmates’ resources as the post together on Google+.
• Production centered: although learners were ‘producing’ a poem in the original lesson, now the entire world can be the audience for the products [poems] created by the learners. Learners should be encouraged to share their original works with the world. Experimenting in writing poetry can be a rewarding experience and it also prepares learners to ‘produce’ something for the world one day in a profession.
• Openly networked: by introducing a always-on digital tool like Google+, learning has little boundaries and learners can review their classmates’ work on the go. The learners can interact, comment, and “+1” posts or comments that they like to interact with each other. Google+ is a free tool and is utilized by many professionals and businesses.
• Academically orientated:
• Peer supported: Google+ is a rich social environment where learners can connect, support, and comment on each other’s work and resources. All learners within the community and worldwide visitors will benefit from the learner’s creations.
• Shared purpose: creating an original work of poetry is a beautiful gift to the world and using social media is a great way to share it with others.

Helpful Guides for Learning Google+

Google Plus: An Easy Guide to the 3rd Social Network
How to Earn a Black Belt in Google+


In conclusion, try the lesson with your learners and have fun creating your poetry!




Example Google+ feed: