Dami's ThinkPad - Web 2.0

  I have held the same assumption about social media for years. It is a tool. Use it well and it serves you. Use it poorly and it wastes your time. Simple enough. Then I sat down with this week's readings, and that assumption started to crack around the edges. The Boundary Nobody Can Find Anymore Greenhow and Lewin open with a provocation that I keep returning to: social media is not just changing how we learn, it is changing what we even mean by learning. The line between formal and informal has always been a little fuzzy, but social media has made it almost impossible to draw. When a doctoral student builds a critical part of their theoretical framework from a thread they stumbled across online at midnight, is that formal learning? Informal? Does the distinction even matter? I think it still matters, but not in the way institutions want it to. The categories exist to protect systems, not learners. And increasingly, learners are operating outside both. A Conversation That ...

I have been in education long enough to know that the most valuable learning I have done rarely happened inside a classroom. It happened in conversations, in late-night rabbit holes that started with one question and ended somewhere entirely unexpected, and in feedback from people who had nothing to gain from being generous with their time. That is what a professional learning environment actually is, at its best. Not a platform. Not a structured program. Not a badge. A network of people and resources that pushes your thinking forward when no one is requiring you to grow. Coming into this PhD journey, I already had a version of that network. Years of working in K-12 education across Africa, building curriculum, leading production teams, and eventually founding a nonprofit taught me early that learning does not wait for institutional permission. You find the people doing interesting work, you pay close attention to how they think, and you contribute something back whenever you can. Tha...

Think back to the moment you received a major life-changing update. For me, it was getting my PhD admission letter to the Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies (ISLT) program at Florida State University. Once the initial rush of excitement and celebration settled, a heavy, practical thought immediately took over: “How am I going to find my people?” Moving across the world to a new city, a new university, and a completely new culture is exhilarating, but it can also be profoundly isolating. We live in an era dominated by recommendation algorithms, but when you are looking for a genuine human community, waiting for an algorithm to serve it to you on a silver platter rarely works. So, I decided to bypass the algorithm entirely. Treating LinkedIn Like a Targeted Search Engine Instead of passively scrolling through my feed hoping to stumble across a connection, I treated LinkedIn like a highly specific, targeted search engine. I knew that names alone weren't enough to narrow d...