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Discussion Forum 2.4(a) Selection aids online
Select a curriculum topic of interest.
Select one of the online communities or resource sharing services listed in this section, and spend some time searching for tags, hashtags, lists or communities of relevance to your topic.
Share a link to a relevant online resource found from that community in Forum 2.4 and discuss the pros and cons of this community as a recommendation source.
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For this activity, I used Twitter as the service to act as my selection aid. My chosen curriculum topic of interest was the climate crisis.
The link I decided to share was an article titled:
The article’s content focused on highlighting how young people are at risk of climate anxiety and depression. It discusses mental health in our youth today and suggests that learning facts, engaging in community building activities and working towards climate solutions are the ways in which teens will manage their anxieties. Leffer (2021) highlights that teens need to read about how other people have initiated change to tackle the climate crisis. It finishes by reviewing 5 recommended books for climate change for young people.
I like to use twitter as I find it easy to use, with lots of links to news stories and recent reviews. The hashtags are used to reach more audience but sometimes there is too much irrelevant information to sift through. I think this aspect of the service can reduce productivity when using it as a selection aid. There are also distractions on the page with links to other ‘tweets’ which may be irrelevant to what I am searching for. The credibility of the posts is another hinderance, with the issues of misinformation being something that needs to be assessed, after all it is a social networking site.