Dami's ThinkPad - Web 2.0

  For African Educators, Social Media Is Not a Supplement. It Is the System. Posted by Damilare Ajayi  Every time this course discussed social media as a tool for learning, I found myself doing a quiet translation in my head. Because the frame that most of the literature assumes, social media as something layered on top of an existing educational infrastructure, does not match what I have watched social media do across the African contexts I have spent my career working in. For millions of African educators, social media is not a supplement to the system. It is the system. The Infrastructure That Was Already There Before governments built teacher-training centers, before universities launched online courses for professional development, before any EdTech company decided African educators were a market worth serving, teachers in Nigeria were sharing lesson plans on WhatsApp. Teachers in Kenya were coordinating across school districts through Facebook groups. Teachers in ...

  Produsage Is Not a Theory. It Is How I Actually Build Things. Posted by Damilare Ajayi  Before this course introduced me to the term produsage, I was already doing it. I just called it building in public. Now I know! When I launched EduPrompt, the free AI lesson plan generator for African educators, the first version was not the product. It was the invitation. I put it out there knowing it was incomplete, knowing that the teachers in Lagos and Nairobi and Kigali who started using it would tell me, through their behavior and their feedback, what it actually needed to become. The tool I have now is not the tool I designed. It is the tool the community designed through use. That is produsage. Not as a pedagogical theory but as a product development philosophy. AI Sparks Hub, the performance support space I built for this course's produsage assignment, made that dynamic explicit in a way that EduPrompt did not. With EduPrompt, the produsage happens at the tool level: users ...

  From Consumers to Contributors: Why I Designed an AI Performance Support Hub for Faculty Posted by Damilare Ajayi  Let us be honest about something. Students are already using AI. They are using it in our courses, between our courses, and often in ways their instructors have not sanctioned, anticipated, or fully understood. This is not a future concern. It is the current reality of every classroom, and the data backs it up. Faculty who have been in the room lately know it. The question is no longer whether students are engaging with AI tools. The question is whether instructors are doing anything intentional with that fact. That is the thought I kept returning to as I designed AI Sparks Hub for this course's produsage assignment. Students Are Already There. Instructors Are Catching Up. In most higher education contexts today, students arrive to class having already interacted with AI in some form, whether that is drafting an email with Copilot, debugging code with Cha...

  When Communities Build What Institutions Cannot: Lessons from the Gaps Posted by Damilare Ajayi  There is a pattern I have noticed across every educational context I have worked in, from classrooms in Nigeria to faculty development programs at Florida State University. When institutions are slow, under-resourced, or simply not designed for the people they are supposed to serve, communities build their own solutions. They do not wait for permission. They find each other, pool what they know, and create something that works well enough to matter. That pattern is not a workaround. It is, I would argue, one of the most powerful forms of learning design that exists. And social media is the infrastructure that makes it possible at scale. The Gap Is Real and It Is Wide Across much of Africa, the educational infrastructure gap is not a policy talking point. It is a daily reality. Teachers in overcrowded classrooms with outdated resources. Students without textbooks. Lesson p...

When the Hashtag Became the Classroom: #EndSARS and the Learning Power of Social Media Activism I grew up in Nigeria. I have family there. I have friends who were on those streets in October 2020. So when I write about #EndSARS, I am not writing about a case study I encountered in a textbook. I am writing about something I watched unfold in real time, from thousands of miles away, through a phone screen, feeling every post like a pulse check on people I love. What happened in Nigeria in 2020 is one of the most instructive examples I know of social media functioning as something far more than a communication tool. It functioned as a civic infrastructure. And if you look at it closely through the lens of what we have been studying this semester, it is also one of the most powerful demonstrations of networked learning I have ever seen. What Started Online #EndSARS began as a demand for the dissolution of SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a Nigerian police unit with a long record...

  You Are Already Learning. You Just Have Not Called It That Yet. There is a particular kind of learning that happens in the margins of a professional day. A LinkedIn post that reframes a problem you have been stuck on. A thread you stumbled across that names a practice you have been doing intuitively without a vocabulary for it. A comment from someone in a different field that makes you see your own work differently. Most professionals would not call any of that learning. They would call it scrolling. Muljana and Luo (2023) would call it something more precise: self-regulated professional learning through social media. And their work made me look at my own LinkedIn habits with considerably more attention than I usually give them. The Structure Beneath the Scroll What Muljana and Luo found in studying how instructional designers use social media for professional development is that the most effective learners are not consuming content randomly. They are applying self-regulati...