 Well I am long overdue to provide an update on my Major Project! The good news is I was quite busy over the February break and before working on it, just no updates. As stated in earlier posts my idea was to really promote healthy digital well-being and awareness. In the initial stages I discussed the idea with staff at my school, select students, family, friends and had great comments from classmates on previous posts. Slowly the idea developed that I would like to inspire people to be their best on and offline selves using social media. I did a few hours of research about social activism, influencers and social media posting in general. I then started an Instagram page @ins.peer.ation and a TikTok channel under the same name, with a few posts spilling on to Facebook (as Instagram was automatically posting there as well, unbeknownst to me). If you are reading this I would love more followers, traffic and commentors to the project so please consider doing so! To date I have four Instagram posts and three TikTok videos (which I also placed on Instagram). It was really a significant amount more work then I imagined researching the project, starting accounts and developing the content. Between coming up with ideas, taking photographs and videos, editting, creating infographics, and keeping up with comments it was and will be surprisingly time consuming. I used my pets for some posts, to have fun with the ideas and this turned out great but involved a shocking amount of set up and photography. I also got some great commentors on Facebook and one friend who wants to use the infographics in her school to create awareness! At this point my goal is to have about 7 to 10 posts on each platform, with different awareness and inspiration behind each post. I have confronted the idea getting outside and away from screens daily, how screen time adds up over long periods and influences who you are as a person, how sleeping with a phone nearby can really disrupt your mental health and sleep, how some apps (social media) often make us less happy and others are neutral or can benefit our learning or efficiency (tools, reading, podcasts etc.).
I would love to hear more ideas from classmates about concepts you think are important around digital well-being and I will do my best to make some of these into Instagram or TikTok posts (or both). Thanks for reading and look forward to your major project updates! 3/3/2022 07:44:01 am
Great update, Dylan! I like the idea of creating the insta/tok accounts... and very lucky that you could have the same domain for both of them! I followed you on Instagram. Is the goal for students to follow and look at previous content or keep posting inspirational content (and teach to it) to support mental health? Looking forward to more updates!
Dylan Johns
3/3/2022 08:05:57 am
Hi Dalton, thanks for the inquiry and engagement. My goal was to create posts about most of the major ideas around wellness with devices over the course of two months or so, which would be available as a resource to any interested. If I felt like it was really making a difference and a worthwhile pursuit I would continue the posts, maybe more like monthly to keep influencing people / students for health and well-being in the digital world. So far I am torn, it is very educational to me to produce the posts and try to influence and inspire, but I much prefer face-to-face interactions and presentations (which I did for EDL 820 once upon a time) The friend I mentioned on Facebook, said I should do school presentations, which I would really enjoy, but just struggling to even find the time to keep up with current responsibilities. Once my parenting and professional responsibilities start to stabalize I would love to continue the pursuit of having youth make great choices as digital citizens, for now I am doing it as a parent, coach, teacher and over the next couuple months or so, a social media influencer!
I think one of the biggest things that I think would be a good idea to discuss would be the idea of reviewing content that one has posted and do a spring clean. Meaning, if something was posted when you were say 13 and now you are 16, and it no longer fits who you are, then to do a purge and delete it. Even though it may not be gone forever (because nothing is ever gone forever on the internet), it shows that students are crtically evaluating what they are subscribing to as young adults. Similarly, I think it's imperative if they have created inappropriate content, to acknowledge that they have made an error, apologize, and learn how they can take steps to 'right' their wrongs. Showing kiddos that even though we make mistakes and deem ourselves as failing, we can learn how to recover, rebuild and be resilient. If we never practice learning from our failures, we won't know how to recover from a negative experience.
Dylan Johns
3/6/2022 08:15:11 am
Thanks for the suggestion Kelly, I'll see what I can come up with. I am thinking of a tree shedding its leaves (or a snake its skin) to continue to grow! I just posted on about the importance of diverse hobbies, and have to sort out a Tik tok on the same topic. Look forward to my first podcast interview Monday! 3/6/2022 12:34:12 pm
I have been loving your posts on Instagram, Dylan! I am glad that you point out how time consuming it is to create polished posts - I think in our culture of immediacy, we often forget the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating a post that we are seeing in real-time. When we are flicking through our news feed, we are living in the 'now,' and not really thinking about what the creator did to put their content together for our viewing. Comments are closed.
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