Goodbye, Social Media
After Twenty Years, I Might Be Done
I started blogging in 2001. I joined Facebook in 2004 when it first opened to anyone with a .edu email address. Three years later, I was on Twitter. I was still blogging. I have a YouTube channel that I used to use for work. I have a Flickr account. I’m on Instagram. And, of course, I’m on LinkedIn. I have tried many other things: Tumblr, del.icio.us, Diigo, Snapchat, and even TikTok. I am a bit of a social media junkie.
Initially, I used social media for work. I was in the ed tech field when I first signed up for these accounts and saw their potential to benefit student learning. I believed in these tools so much, I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on the use of blogging in the classroom.
I connected to a lot of people in those early days. I found a group of people around the world who were equally enthusiastic about the potential of social media to disrupt education (in a positive way, not the tech field’s usual method of disruption). A few of those people I now consider friends, and we get together periodically when the opportunity arises, even though we’re not all online anymore.
