Report on Engagement

This is a reflection on my participation in JSGS882 with specific reference to the use of social media and various web based applications in order to engage with my classmates and the world.

I will not deny my reluctance at the beginning of the semester when I read that Twitter was a course requirement. I never understood the appeal of the microblogging platform but I have come to appreciate it over the past few weeks as a tool for sharing and receiving bite sized morsels of information.

One of the experiences that meant a lot to me, small as it may have been, was the opportunity to interact with Kent Greenfield the author of the book I chose to review for this course. Shortly after setting up my account and announcing the book I was reading Prof Longo shared Mr. Greenfield’s Twitter handle with me. I tweeted him indicating that I had enjoyed the book, having sent that message out into the universe I didn’t expect a response and chalked it up to giving my best effort at utilising the tools of the course.

Kent Greenfield Retweet of My Message with Response

Imagine my surprise (and delight) when he responded. In that moment I was connected to this person whom I would probably never meet in real life but we had been able to have this exchange. And I thoroughly enjoyed his book so it was an opportunity to interact with someone for whom I had developed great respect.

It has also been a great experience to be able to use a variety of different media to interact with my classmates. I appreciated the comments and feedback on my book review and the opportunity to see what others had read and how it connected to my chosen book. The use of blogs and tweets meant that I was able to engage with this material at my convenience which allowed me to be best prepared to absorb the information presented and revisit it as necessary to solidify any concepts.

Since blogging while I was interning in Sri Lanka I have thought several times about starting a new blog, I’ve always been held back by whether or not I had something to say which would be of interest to other people. This course and this opportunity has taught me that we all have something important to say, there were so many novel perspectives and insights that I was able to gain from engaging with my classmates and that I was exposed to from being on Twitter.

The rest of this semester is exceedingly busy but I would like to keep up with the blog in the summer after establishing a clear point of view and objective for the blog. I will be staying on Twitter, my tweets may not be as frequent but I have grown accustomed to getting a quick glimpse of what the world is talking about in my notifications feed.

Below I have included some statistics regarding the audience for my blog since it was launched on February 2nd 2017:


Pageviews by country:

Entry	Pageviews
Canada	32
United States	3