Adam's home stretch

I wasn’t aware of this until recently, but it seems lurkers have somehow developed a bad reputation of late. These are the folks who read posts, watch videos, observe chats, or otherwise consume content without actively contributing to the communities they frequent. In some circles, this behavior is labeled as free-riding . I don't see it like that. To me, a lurker is simply a contributor-in-waiting. An individual who is reading, learning, and observing the community until they find a topic that really resonates with them. Something they can sink their teeth into. I think most people go through a lurking phase. Honestly, I can’t think of many times where someone joins a chat, subreddit, or online group and immediately starts firing off posts. Lurking gives people a chance to get a lay of the land. It helps them observe the norms, understand the culture, and maybe even pick up the lingo that seasoned members use. This kind of quiet participation is valuable because it prepares th...

Reading about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) made me realize I’d unknowingly built one while prepping to build my new gaming PC. I’m not a hardware expert by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, I'm just a long-time gaming nerd who owned a seven-year-old rig that was starting to show its age. What began with watching YouTube videos and browsing Reddit posts turned into a full-on learning process that mirrored the three-tier PLE framework described by Dabbagh and Kitsantas (2012). I unknowingly started at Tier 1: personal information management . I saved building guides and Reddit posts, and built a YouTube playlist filled with how-to videos about fan optimization, cable management, and motherboard features. All of my learning was unstructured and self-directed, with a focus on gathering anything and everything that I felt would be useful. Next was the second tier: social interaction and collaboration . I started engaging with Reddit communities, asking for feedback on my ...

I never liked Twitter. Thinking back, I found its structure to be redundant since I was already an active Facebook user who made posts that  didn't  have a character limit. While I'm not a Twitter user, I am someone who likes to stay on top of news, and once Twitter became X, I found that I only ever heard bad news about the company. So today I decided to sate my curiosity and answer the question: What's up with X? The answer isn’t simple, and the articles I read paint a grim picture. The common thread between most news stories is that ever since Elon Musk took over, there’s been a steady decline in app downloads and active users. The platform has struggled with ad revenue and brand safety, and its inconsistent enforcement of content policies has made it a hotspot for hate speech and harmful misinformation. Elon hasn’t taken this criticism lightly. In fact, he recently filed a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that their characterization of hi...

In an era where online discourse often falls into echo chambers, r/ChangeMyView (CMV) offers a refreshing, if somewhat abrasive, alternative. This subreddit invites users to post strong opinions and encourages others to challenge them, ideally with respect, tact, and with the goal of growth. The result is a model of civil disagreement that promotes critical thinking and builds knowledge through dialogue. While traditional hive minds tend to promote consensus, CMV is designed for disagreement. It leverages collective intelligence to sharpen and refine ideas through disagreement as opposed to reinforcing shared beliefs. In this model, learning doesn't come from conformity. Instead, it is born from the collaborative process of questioning and rethinking. I believe that higher education can borrow from this structure to improve online and in-person classroom discussions, which sadly often fail to spark meaningful engagement. Rather than asking students to simply share opinions, educato...

Digital Natives, a term to describe those of us who grew up with technology, are no strangers to change. We’ve seen enough major tech shifts that nothing really surprises us anymore. We went from flip phones to smartphones, ran tech support for our parents, built lives on social media, use AI to plan our finances, and swipe in cardinal directions just to find a date. Another day, another breakthrough. Because of this constant exposure to change, we’ve become wired for dynamic environments. And that’s why conventional education, with its static delivery and rigid structure, isn't going to cut it anymore. The world has moved on from static delivery and rigid learning environments. Lectures and textbooks feel outdated to a generation that just learned how to poach an egg from a 30-second TikTok. This shift creates both challenges and opportunities for instructional designers. Traditional models that rely on passive learning are a thing of the past. To stay relevant and effective, ins...

This is my final term in the ISLT program, which is why I’ve named this blog Adam’s Home Stretch . That said, the name might be a little misleading—this blog isn’t so much about wrapping up grad school as it is about reflecting on my relationship with social media, which, at this point in time, feels... complicated. There was a time when I was much more active online. My last blog documented my years teaching ESL in South Korea, from 2011 to 2014. Before that, I was a college student with a Facebook account—back when Facebook was still exclusive to college students. I loved posting, sharing photos, commenting, and connecting. It felt fun, fresh, and meaningful. Social media helped me stay in touch with friends and discover new communities. Looking back, those posts now serve as a time capsule of some of the most formative years of my life. These days, though, I rarely create anything on social media, which is ironic, considering I now work for a major social media company. Part of it...