Category: socialnetworking

  • Preserving the Past Through Technology

    Preserving the Past Through Technology

    At the March 2025 NCMLE Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, the American Book Company‘s podcasting team interviewed me and published an 8 minute audio recording of our conversation. Check it out! “Preserving the Past Through Technology” My middle school family oral history unit is available on my curriculum sharing website. Learn more about Bob Sprankle…

  • Sharing Mastodon Lists

    Sharing Mastodon Lists

    I am a BIG fan of the federated social media platform Mastodon, and this evening I used Claude.ai to generate code in an HTML file which allows me to quickly share my LISTS on Mastodon with others. Unlike Twitter, lists on Mastodon are PRIVATE and not directly sharable with others. I spent some time both…

  • Multi-dimensional Digital Identity

    Multi-dimensional Digital Identity

    This is a comment and reflection I shared on this blog post by Allysia Doratti, one of Dean Shareski‘s EC&I 832 graduate students in fall 2024: Mirror, Mirror, On My Feed: Exploring Identity in a Digital World. Hi Allysia- Thanks so much for this thoughtful post and especially for the reflections on digital identity and…

  • Facebook Friend Safety Tips

    Facebook Friend Safety Tips

    I’m on Facebook frequently, and I’ve noticed it’s become a REAL MESS because of poor account security and rampant cybercrime. I have multiple relatives and friends now who have lost control over their Facebook accounts. Sometimes these individuals have created another Facebook account, creating confusion about “what is the real account?” Some of these people…

  • Internet Radio Dreams

    Internet Radio Dreams

    This morning I’m dreaming of Internet Radio: My OWN Internet radio station patterned after the amazing example of ds106 Radio. Let me explain. In December 2012, I published the 3 minute photo story, “Live Internet Radio Broadcasting from a Bus.” In it, I shared “a story about webcasting a live radio show from a bus…

  • War Over TikTok

    War Over TikTok

    The article caught my eye this morning: “US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users” (ArsTechnica, 7 Mar 2024.). It highlights a proposed bill in the US House of Representatives which would require the Chinese government to entirely DIVEST (sell off) TikTok to non-Chinese owners. I have a few…

  • Beware of Facebook Event Bad Actors

    Beware of Facebook Event Bad Actors

    Scammers and bad actors are not new. The methods which con artists use to try and trick people into giving away their money or sharing private, personal information continue to evolve, however. It can be valuable to learn about some of these new scam techniques, especially in our increasingly DIGITAL world. In this post, I’d…

  • AI Bionic Blogging

    New tools can provide new opportunities to not only “enhance efficiency,” but (in some cases) “transformatively empower” users to do things which were previously impossible. In the case of artificial intelligence / AI technologies, the combination of speech to text, automated transcription and “content augmentation” services can enable new, transformative content creation workflows. In this…

  • Meet Me on Mastodon (My “Dear John Letter” to Twitter)

    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one group of digital communicators to discontinue use of the secure user IDs and passwords which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the the right and responsibility to affiliate with others who are kind and strive…

  • Disruptive Decentralization in Social Media and AI

    Centralization and decentralization both have their pros and cons. In this post, I want to explore the opportunities and challenges posed by these two paradigms in two contemporary technological contexts: Social media and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the realm of social media, Twitter has become a hotbed of controversy for numerous reasons, primarily due to…