Week 5 in Review

This week was insane.  I learned so much from my colleagues at the Social Media and Society International Conference.  It was so perfect that the timing aligned with this course.  I leave Toronto tomorrow evening, so I am spending the rest of my time here "playing tourist."

Here is a quick recap of the conference (the stuff I didn't mention in my previous post):

There were A LOT of brilliant "social media minds" at this conference.  The photo below is really difficult to see, so here's what it says: we (the attendees) were multi- and inter-disciplinary and we represented over 100 institutions from 27 different countries and territories.  

Lee Rainie (who co-wrote our course text "Networked") was yesterday's keynote speaker.  He was actually introduced by the co-author, Barry Wellman.  He discussed a lot Pew Researcher Center's current research about social media.  Some of the topics included: social media use, onlien harassment, and trust.

Today's keynote speaker was Ron Deibert.  He is the Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.  He discussed a lot of the Citizen Lab's work regarding censorship, digital security, privacy, human rights, security, and surveillace.  

One of the really cool things about the conference was that a group was hired to create visuals of each of the keynote addresses.  Here they are:

In other news, I tried two of the tools: OER commons and Periscope.  I really liked OER commons and I am very excited to explore it further.  And then there's Periscope... Honestly, I don't quite understand it, so I am very excited to use it next week with Vanessa, Taehyeong, and Ray!